And this is where Great-uncle Aaron’s problems really began.
They began the way problems so often do in Russia, with poems.
When not busy shooting Germans, Uncle Aaron wrote poems. No one really knows what they were about, but those poems did catch the eye of the girlfriend of Aaron’s superior, a corporal.
Once the corporal found out that his girl was Private Aaron’s muse, the young poet was arrested and sentenced under the USSR’s Article 58, counterrevolutionary activity, in Aaron’s case, the praising of German technology. (“He really was impressed by German tanks,” my mother says.)
And so the boy who watched his parents and sister slaughtered before his eyes at age sixteen, who ambushed German soldiers on the roads of Belorussia by age seventeen, came out of the war at age eighteen to collect the typical reward of the era, ten years of hard labor in a Siberian lagpunkt, or work camp.
My mother’s favorite thing in the world growing up was sweetened condensed milk (sgushchyonka), a cousin of the Latin American dulce de leche. Among the oversweetened pantheon of Russian desserts, it would become my childhood favorite as well.
In the labor camps foodstuffs like sgushchyonka served as currency—a good way not to get raped or forced into the worst kinds of labor—and so my grandfather would cart up to twenty of those iconic blue cans of Soviet condensed milk to the post office to send to his brother-in-law Aaron. My mother, on the other hand, was allowed only one tablespoon of condensed milk before bedtime.
My mother’s first memory: walking through the ruined streets of postwar Leningrad with her aristocratically thin, ever-ailing economist father, a cigarette stamped permanently into his mouth, as he dragged along twenty cans of sgushchyonka to send to her uncle, the prisoner, thinking, How lucky Uncle Aaron must be that he gets to eat twenty cans of condensed milk!
There is a picture of my mother at the time. She is about four years old and as chubby as I’ve ever seen her, smiling underneath a pleasant brown bob. Born months after the war ended to a family with decent connections and a decent flat, she will one day join that ever-ephemeral phenomenon, the Russian middle class. The picture is one of several of my mother being young and happy—at the Thanksgiving dinner she takes me to my upstairs bedroom with these photos and says, “Look how happy my family looked by comparison to his,” meaning my father’s. Indeed, there’s nothing special about the photo, except that its upper-right corner has been torn off, and one can discern a crescent of needle holes. Why did someone take needle and thread to this innocent image?
This photograph was “sewn into the case file” (podshyto k delu) of my great-uncle Aaron when he was in the camps. At one point, my grandmother had sent a letter with the photograph of my mother to my uncle Aaron in Siberia, and the camp’s administration had found the beaming face of a four-year-old important enough to sew into a prisoner’s case file.
Perhaps the greatest unanswered question I have toward the entire Land of the Soviets is this: Who did the sewing?
In a country recovering from the greatest war humanity has ever known, with twenty-six million in their graves (my grandfather Isaac included), who took the time out of a starving, snowy day to carefully hand sew the tiny photo of a smiling four-year-old, my mother, into the “criminal” case file of a man—a boy, really, by today’s standards—who had watched his family die just half a decade ago, who had fought the enemy back across the border, and who had subsequently been imprisoned for writing poetry and admiring a German tank? So much information is open to us, the past is ready and accessible and Googleable, but what I wouldn’t give to know the person whose job it was to make sure my mother’s photo made the rounds of Stalin’s labor camps, only to end up, as Great-uncle Aaron fortunately did, in a cozy house along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, minus the four fingers on his right hand, lost to a timber saw in Siberia during his decade of savage and pointless labor.
My mother. With her dreams of being buried alive. With her meticulous collection of family photos, some filed under the World War II subheading “Uncle Simon, Wife, Murdered Children,” written in Russian in her equally meticulous script.
My mother, in the first despairing bloom of youth, looking, as she would say, ozabochena, a combination of worried and moody and maybe lovesick, a Soviet-era bow crowning the top of her puffy, full-lipped face as if to inform us that the woods behind her do not belong to a sunny summer camp in the Catskills. It is 1956. She is eleven years old in a striped summer dress, resembling, already, a worried young Jewish adult.
My beaming mother in her red Young Pioneer tie, ready to serve the Soviet state with the common Pioneer cheer I am always ready! shouted at the top of her lungs. “I never took it off,” she says of the red tie. “After I got into the Pioneers, I never took it off. Even in the summer! Such a great Pioneer I was!”
My mother, serious and dreamy, behind a childhood piano. Her mother ties her to the piano bench with a towel so that she won’t escape to jump rope with the kids screaming for her outside her window. Eventually the music will seep in. She will go to music school and later teach piano in a Leningrad kindergarten. She will marry a man who wants to be an opera singer, who once went to music school just like her, although she will deem his school inferior.
My mother, off camera, in our Moscow Square apartment, tossing from a nightmare in one room while I am tossing from asthma and a nightmare in the other. She’s dreaming she left her notes at home and now the kindergarten class won’t be ready for a special performance. I’m dreaming I forgot some part of me, too, a toy version of Buratino, the Russian Pinocchio, left on a platform in Sevastopol, Crimea, left for some lucky boy or girl.
My mother in our first American co-op apartment, dark brown curls, backless dress, playing the shiny Red October upright piano we had brought at great cost from Leningrad. Atop the piano, a golden menorah with a fake emerald at its center alongside a white vase filled with chalky ceramic flowers. My mother looks hesitant before the keys. She is already throwing herself into her American work, work that will lead her from the title of Typist to that of Fiscal Administrator for a large Manhattan-based charity. The Red October, useless now, will be given to Goodwill in return for a three-hundred-dollar tax deduction.
“Two girls,” my mother says, holding up the photo of her playing the piano in Leningrad, the dreaming, distracted child, and the other of her, a single-minded immigrant mother, behind the Red October in Queens, New York. “One as I was and one as I became.”
I have known only one of those girls. My dear immigrant mother, my fellow anxious warrior. The one she became. The other one I have tried to know. Through the stories, the photographs, the archival evidence, the shared love of condensed milk, the Red Pioneer tie I never got to wear but that graced her neck so proudly. I have known only one of those girls. But, please believe me, I have known her.
The author’s beloved grandma Polya rejoins the family in Rome. She has flown in three kilograms of soap from Leningrad. A Soviet newscast has informed her of a shortage of soap in America.
THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO READ like a Cold War spy novel. Security checks, East Berlin, Soviet customs agents. This was supposed to read like a Cold War spy novel, but the James Bond in question, me, can’t make kaka.
“Mama! Papa! Oooooooo!” It is the day before our departure for Western Europe and then America, and I am sitting on my little green potty—write a hundred-page novel, sure; but use an actual grown-up toilet, I’m too scared of falling in—and I can’t get the kakashka out.
Staraisya, staraisya, my parents urge me, one after the other. Try harder, try harder. Napryagis’. Strain yourself.
Later, I’m on the Culture Couch, my stomach still full of undigested cabbage, and I can’t sleep. The suitcases are packed, the living room where I sleep is now dominated by a pair of huge army-green sacks stuffed with decades of accumulated life, specifically the thick cotton comforter beneath which I struggle to stay alive; in fact, everything is packed, and th
e fighting between my parents has reached some kind of worried détente, the usual go-to-the-dicks and fuck-your-mothers and don’t-swear! replaced with gloomy, indeterminate whispers, even as the Bad Rocket belches its smoke outside, and I tremble within on the Culture Couch. I peek at the rising sun, at the signs for MEAT and PRODUCE. Everything is covered in frost. Real Russian frost. Every snowbank is a fortress on the scale of the turreted Engineers’ Castle, the snow pale and bled out by the brief winter sun. Anyone who has experienced such frost will never abide its mushy Western equivalent.
Neither Mama nor Papa has told me that we are about to leave the Land of the Soviets for good. My parents are paranoid that I might blab it to some adult in power, and our exit visas will be canceled. No one has told me, but I know. And I have staged my own form of protest. I have brought on the worst asthma attack yet, a sputtering of helplessness so obscene that my parents consider not leaving.
Our apartment near Moscow Square has been sold to the son of a high-ranking party member. The party member’s son and his dad are very keen to see us haul our Jewish asses out and take possession of every square foot of our former property, not to mention our explosive Signal black-and-white television. They will also get the shabby Culture Couch on which I’ve slept and dreamed cultured dreams, tried to play the violin and the balalaika, and, with the help of my grandma Galya, written my masterpiece Lenin and His Magical Goose. Also included in the price of the apartment, the floor-to-ceiling wooden ladder my father built to try to help me conquer my fear of heights and to make me into an Athlete.
Son of a Party Member stops by with his high-ranking father, who happens to have a medical degree. “We don’t know what to do,” my mother tells the Communist Party duo. “The child has asthma. Maybe we should stay.”
Dr. Apparatchik, keen to get the apartment into his Communist son’s hands, says, “My medical opinion is that you should go. There will be better care for asthma in the West.”
Which is so very true.
My mother decides we should proceed with our flight. In response, my asthma gets worse. I will not let them take me. In the morning, I try the potty again, but nothing doing, the cabbage inside me knows our destination better than I do. It desperately wants to emigrate to the West, to end its life inside a gleaming Viennese toilet.
The last minutes on Tipanov Street are hazy. Do we sit down for a silent moment before the journey, as is the Russian custom? What’s the point? This journey will have no end.
Taxi to the airport. And there the truth of the matter is revealed to me: Aunt Tanya is here and my aunt Lyusya, who will die a decade later of cancer that would be operable almost anywhere else, and her daughter, my cousin Victoria, the ballerina whose hand I touched through glass during my quarantine, who begs my mother, “I want to come with you!” Everyone is here except my grandma Galya, who is bedridden. Nas provozhayut. We are being “sent off,” meaning this is not just a jaunt down to Crimea or Soviet Georgia. This is final. But where are we going?
Wailing before the customs line, the Jews are saying goodbye to their relatives with all the emotion they are well known for, saying goodbye forever. And there are so many Jews headed out on the Leningrad–East Berlin flight that the shores of Brooklyn and the tree-lined boulevards of Queens and the foggy valleys of San Francisco are already groaning in anticipation. Eyes still wet, all of us Snotties today, we are searched thoroughly by customs agents. A big man in full uniform takes off my fur hat and pokes around the lining, looking for diamonds we may have stashed illegally within. As a child I have never been mistreated by the system. In Russia, as in socialist China, there is a special grace accorded to children—in both countries there is usually only one little emperor per family. But I am no longer a Soviet citizen, and I am no longer worth according any special childhood privileges. I do not know it, but I am a traitor. And my parents are traitors. And if a good many people got their wish we would be dealt with as traitors.
The customs agent is plunging his thick fingers into my fur hat, and the asthmatic me is so scared he does not even have the wherewithal not not to breathe. And so I gulp down the thick ammonia-and-sweat-scented air of the small Stalin-era international terminal of dodgy Pulkovo Airport. My parents are nearby, but for the first time in my life I am alone without them, standing before authority. The customs agent finishes fondling my hat and puts it back on my head with a combination of a smile and a sneer. I am leaving Russia, but he will never leave. If only the child-me could have the compassion to understand that monumental fact.
Down the customs line, our luggage and the two gigantic army-green sacks have been thrown open for inspection. Feathers are flying out of our prized red comforter as the pages of my mother’s beige leather address book—the names and phone numbers of some relatives in Queens—are being torn out for no good reason by a sadist in uniform, as if we are spies smuggling information to the West. Which, in a sense, we are.
And then we are clear of the formalities, and clear also of our relatives. Writing today I can guess the word in my mother’s mind: tragediya. It is a tragic day for her. My father’s mother will soon join us in America, but my mother will not see her mother until 1987, right before her death, by which point Grandma Galya will be too far gone to even recognize her second daughter. Until the reformist Gorbachev takes over, traitors to the Soviet Union are not allowed to return to visit their dying parents. I suppose I am feeling her sadness, because I am, as my mother likes to say, chutkiy, or sensitive. But truth be told, I am not chutkiy enough. Because all I can see in front of us is the Aeroflot plane, the Tupolev-154. On one of his didactic trips around the Chesme Church, my father has told me that the Tupolev is the fastest civilian jet ever built, faster than the American Boeing 727! Certainly faster than the toy helicopter we are launching at the church spires along with our aeronautical cheers of “URA!”
And now we are inside this sleek, magical airplane, the one that can so decisively outfly our Cold War rival’s, and rumbling past the vast airfield, past the denuded winter trees in the distance, past the acres of snow deep enough to hide a thousand children. Forget asthma. I, myself, am holding my breath before the wonder of it. Sure, I am afraid of heights, but being inside the futuristic Tupolev, the fastest civilian jet ever built, is akin to being wrapped in my father’s arms.
No one has told me where we are going, but I have already prepared to be a fine representative of the Soviet race. On my breast, beneath the monumental overcoat and the monumental winter sweater, is a shirt sold only in the USSR and perhaps in the more discriminating shops of Pyongyang. It is a green wide-collared thing with blue and green vertical stripes and, between the stripes, a galaxy of yellow polka dots. The terminals of the shirt are tucked into a pair of black pants that reach up to my kidneys, ostensibly to keep them warm in transit. I have pinned this shirt with the symbol of the upcoming 1980 Moscow Olympics, a stylized Kremlin capped with a red star. The fluid lines of the Kremlin are reaching toward the star because my nation is always reaching toward excellence. Beneath the Olympic pin is situated the pin of a smiling tiger’s face. This is in mourning of Tigr, my stuffed tiger, who is too big to make the journey to wherever it is we are going.
Which is where again? Mama and Papa remain silent and worried throughout the flight. My mother scans the airplane’s badly sealed window for drafts. Drafts, according to Russian medical lore, are the great, silent killers.
We land with a proper thud somewhere and taxi to a terminal. I am looking out the window and yobtiki mat’, fuck your mother, the sign—FLUGHAFEN BERLIN-SCHÖNEFELD—is not even in Russian anymore. Inside the terminal, past the officials in their green getups, an unfortunate, umlauted language is being spoken, my first understanding that the world is not powered entirely by the great and mighty Russian tongue.
“Papa, who are these people?”
“Germans.”
But aren’t we supposed to kill Germans? That’s what Grandpa did to them in the Great Patriotic War before
they blew him up in his tank. (A childhood lie on someone’s part; as I’ve mentioned before, he was merely an artilleryman.) And yet, even the child in me senses the difference between here and home. East Berlin is the socialist showpiece of the entire Warsaw Pact, and the airport waiting lounge seems to hover somewhere between Russia and the West. There are dashes of chrome, if I remember correctly, and exotic nongray colors, purple or mauve perhaps. The men seem to be powered by some extraordinary force, a grim ability to walk forth in a straight line and to meaningfully declare things in their strange tongue. The difference, I am too young to understand, is that the men here are not completely, debilitatingly drunk.
Fuck your mother, please, where are we going?
A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition, and this is the problem with sending an already disturbed child across not just national borders but, in the year 1978, across interplanetary ones. I have not had a full-blown asthma attack in twenty of the past nearly forty years, but even thinking of Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld shortens my breath as I write this. Here we are sitting surrounded by our possessions, two army-green sacks and a trio of orange suitcases made out of real Polish leather that leave my hands smelling like cow. Here I am next to Mama, who has just surrendered her dying mother. Here I am next to our family’s history, which I do not fully know yet, but which is every bit as heavy as our two army-green sacks. Here I am pushing my own history through East German customs, a history not even seven years old but already with its own mass and velocity. In practical terms, the army-green sacks are too heavy for a child, or a mama, to lift, but I push them forward with a kick whenever I can to help out my family. The instincts that will see me through my life are stirring for the first time: forward, move forward, keep going, keep kicking.
Little Failure Page 8