The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  Copyright © 2017 by Anna Fishbeyn

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photo credit Nikki Harrison

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62872-758-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62872-760-9

  Printed in the United States

  Prologue

  One is never too young to receive unhelpful advice on marriage. I was barely over the hill of my fifth birthday when my grandmother told me that marriage is not for the feeble-minded masses who so readily and pathetically jump into it as if they’re chewing gum. “Make sure you don’t pick a shmata, a hysteric, or a philanderer,” she warned. When Grandmother read Cinderella to me, she went off on tangents about injustice in general and unjust marriages in particular, and how she and Cinderella were practically the same person: “I too worked five jobs, fought in the war, cleaned and cooked for every aunt and cousin this side of the Baltic, and suffered from ulcers and insomnia. But when I went to the ball, I put a cheery face on for the crowd and pranced on the dance floor in imported Italian leather pumps three times smaller than my size, like every woman I knew. Your grandfather came up to me and said, ‘Do you have a smoke, gorgeous?’ and I said, ‘You should quit.’ It was love at first insult.”

  “Was he a prince?” I asked. Grandmother laughed and said, “A prince with empty pockets and a few gold teeth!” Still, Grandmother didn’t want to snuff out all my childish optimism. In her awkward way, she tried to assure me that there were glorious men out there, but they were hidden—and it was my task in life to find them. Only my older, blonder sister, Bella, thought that a prince with an impish sense of humor and our father’s brilliant brain (male looks were considered irrelevant in our family) was prowling the streets in search of her, and that all she had to do was appear magically on our balcony, arch her back, fling her hair, and poof—she would be a happily married woman. But as far as I could tell, marriage was just the beginning of suffering, some black void of happiness that human beings fell into and then were never heard of again. I believed this not only because I was born in Russia, nourished on Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevksy, fatalistic grandmothers, Communist propaganda, bronze sculptures of Lenin, and a scarcity of toilet paper, but because every marriage I knew, including the one that produced me, was a volatile volcano bordering on adultery and divorce.

  That is why, at the age of five, I told Bella that I would never get married, even if Perfection Personified waltzed through our front door, and by that I certainly did not mean some insipid prince. “What about your suitors,” she countered, “don’t you want to marry them?” Mitya and Andre were my first potential husbands, and since all such husbands tend to be accidents of convenience, they lived next door. Andre lived below us and was decisively handsome, which in kindergarten amounted to dark locks and a natural tan, but he had little to offer in the way of intellect and barely understood the concept of a joke. I had to resort to slapping him to get him to run after me and pull on my hair—a popular Russian expression of love in extremely shy or extremely bellicose men. Mitya, on the other hand, resembled an undernourished piglet with wispy blond hair and wide curious eyes, but he was a kind-hearted boy who bought me presents with his parents’ money and was the first to propose. Andre soon followed suit and the two of them fought for my hand, quite literally, by pulling on my arms and screaming: “Lenochka is mine!” “No, she’s mine!” Already a closet feminist, I pounced on them: “I am no one’s, no one’s, you hear!”

  At home I posed a hypothetical question to my mother: “Why can’t women have more than one husband?”

  “Because women prefer to have lovers on the side,” she replied bluntly, for my mother was a blunt woman, with a rebellious fire in her bright turquoise eyes and the sort of wide evocative forehead that belonged to uniquely independent minds. She believed that children, namely myself and my sister, were far wiser than adults in the ways of the human heart and should be consulted in all matters of love, regardless of their age.

  “What’s a lover?” I asked.

  “A man who isn’t your father but who makes your mother happy.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “No, but I should,” my mother said wistfully, and then Grandmother came in. These types of conversations did not sit well with my grandmother, who, in addition to being the self-anointed Cinderella, was the moral force of the family, the Yiddish-speaking Virgin Incarnate, the Jewish Mother Theresa, the superhuman female who held it all together and then some.

  “Mitya and Andre want to marry me,” I told Grandmother. “They almost tore my arms out.”

  “That’s how they always are in the beginning—men!” Grandmother moaned. “Prostrating themselves like pathetic dogs, but once you give them your heart, they’ll step on it and then cheat on you to let you know they really care.” She said this not only because my grandfather was a notorious philanderer—his list of women stretched all the way to Latvia and Odessa—but because Grandmother was too righteous to cheat back.

  Then my mother turned to me with a serious gaze. “Remember, Lenochka, in the tricky business of predicting fidelity, age is an irrelevant factor, as are a man’s looks.” At which point my mother and grandmother leapt to discuss their theory of Russian men, which they felt perfectly captured the ordeal of being a Russian woman. It held that men who are uglier and shorter are more likely to cheat, since they are more insecure and too often suffer from the taxing Napoleon complex. Although they tend to have serious expertise in bed, it doesn’t make up for their constant need to be buttered up and flattered by their mistresses. Due to their physical inadequacies, they tend to develop an oversized brain because they know a Russian woman goes limp in the knees when a man can recite all of Evgeni Onegin. The handsome ones, however, are always being pawed by adoring women and have to fight off superhuman temptations, which is an unrealistic goal. Their beauty makes them feel overly content with their brains, and as a result, not only do they have feeble memories, but they are usually selfish and uneventful lovers.

  Although this theory was liberally applied to other women’s husbands, my own handsome father was never subjected to its rigid laws. Grandmother believed that my mother lucked out with my father. First there were the essentials: he did not beat her, cheat on her, deal on the black market, drink enormous quantities of vodka, or refuse to take showers like some men they knew. “You’re never gonna find a man as good as your Semeyon, tfu, tfu, tfu,” she would exclaim and knock on wood whenever my mother complained about my father. “Besides, no man is perfect,” Grandmother would offer as an afterthought.

  My mother would discover how true this particular afterthought was after that mysterious day in September of 1975 when Lana Rubin, our neighbor upstairs, burst into our apartment on Usiy
evicha Street breathless with news.

  “Jews are being let out!” she exclaimed, her face red and sweaty from the excitement. “My cousin and his wife are already applying for their exit visas.”

  “Are you sure we won’t get arrested?” my mother asked.

  “I don’t know, but we can leave Russia! Can you imagine that?” No one could imagine that.

  But a few months later, Lana’s news was confirmed by Yakov, my father’s older brother: a man who cheated on his wife, dealt on the black market, drank liberal amounts of vodka, and possessed few redeeming features on his pudgy perpetually red face. My mother and grandmother had long ago consigned Yakov to that category of men who lack the essentials. Against the backdrop of my father, Yakov appeared like an amusing mutation of all the wrong genes. Yet his bold move to start the application process early, to imagine a happier future in America when everyone else became morbidly pale from this very thought, impressed my mother. “He’s got guts!” my mother announced. To which my father responded with an avalanche of criticisms: Yakov was a heartless letch, a materialist, the depraved son willing to abandon his mother for a wealthier life in America. “What does he want with more money?” my father threw out indignantly. “He already has enough here.” “It’s not about the money,” my mother held, “it’s about freedom.” “The freedom to speculate?” my father roared. “Anything would be better than this, this”—here my mother pointed to her throat and squeezed it—“they suffocate you here.” “I’m never leaving my mother,” my father declared, “and that’s the end of the discussion.” But with each passing month, as others began to gather documents and whisper of a life beyond Soviet borders, Yakov became in my mother’s eye a man of courage and vision, a prince in the garb of a frog. When a year later Yakov received permission to leave the Soviet Union with his wife, Katya, and his son from a previous marriage, Valeryi, my mother had a revelation: we too could leave. At their going-away party, dancing wildly on Yakov’s parquet floors, her head buzzing with champagne and foreign music, my mother began to dream of her own going-away party, while my father dreamed of a life without Yakov.

  When my parents returned from the airport after watching Yakov, Katya, and Valeryi board the plane to Vienna, the first stopover on their long journey to the United States, they were no longer on speaking terms. According to Grandmother, it was my mother’s fault, as she indelicately told my father that he was a smelly mudila (my mother’s endearing take on that succinct Russian swear word mudak that captured all the negative sides of a man’s personality: idiot, asshole, imbecile, liar, and nag). My father retaliated by ordering my mother to shove herself up her own ass, and go marry Yakov. But when, in self-defense, my mother accused him of uttering an illogical syllogism, my father could only inhale gasoline reeking from a Russian cab and push waves of nausea back down his throat (as he was a very sensitive individual), which in turn led to self-pity and paralysis of the tongue. My mother continued to berate him, but after all, she was only human, and as my father said nothing, she lost interest in him. She looked out the window and imagined a more valiant husband for herself, floating somewhere above the buildings bedecked in placards of Stalin and Lenin.

  For the next several years, talk of emigrating would consume the Jews of Moscow, eating away at their daily routines, their Saturday night festivities, their thoughts before going to sleep and upon waking up. Their abstracted gazes followed them to their jobs, to the lavish Moscow subway adorned in mosaics and bronze heads of Lenin, and to long lines of waiting for meat, bread, and Italian leather boots. Recent updates on who was going, who was thinking of going, and who would never go became the focus of every hushed conversation. There was the couple downstairs who had been arrested at the last minute, the husband who had been a physicist for the military and would surely be denied permission to leave, and strange unexplained cases of many others who had been refused for no apparent reason—families with packed suitcases, sold furniture, and lost jobs.

  Then there was Lana Rubin, who, after much haggling with her husband, had finally put her application documents in the mail exactly two years after our own Yakov left. “This business is not for the weak,” she told my mother. “You have to contact a ‘relative’ in Israel, get them to ‘invite’ you, get an exit visa from the KGB, get yourself out of the Communist Party, sell all your furniture to pay ‘taxes’ in order to be able to actually leave—” Her voice faltered. “They hold meetings, call people, pass out flyers, and seat you on a stool in front of hundreds of die-hard patriots, including your own co-workers. Everyone starts yelling at you all at once—profanities, you know, ‘you fucking blyat,’ they say, ‘you traitor of the motherland! Russia fed you, bathed you, educated you and now you’re abandoning it for money, for fat capitalists! We’re your friends, you treacherous Yid!’ They cry out as though you’re stabbing them with a knife. ‘Decided to become a Zionist, did you? You dirty Zhid, you think Russia isn’t good enough for you anymore!’ Oh, the humiliation of it all! I had to do it, but Osik didn’t—he’s still working, staying under the radar. He says, ‘What are we going to live on?’” Her face fell into her hands. Through stilted breaths, she muttered, “No one knows anything! Who knows if we’ll ever get out, and I don’t have a job now—Oh, Bozhenka help us!”

  Only when we were in America did I find out that as soon as our applications were received in OVIR, the Bureau of Immigration Affairs, we were branded traitors to the motherland and our citizenship was altered to a new status: people “v podache”—those waiting to get out. Banned from the Communist Party, my parents could no longer hold onto their jobs—an unthinkable concept under the theoretical tenets of Communism. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat bread,” the slogans read. We became tuniyadtzyi—in the language of our favorite Politburo writers, parasites gnawing on the efficiency and beneficence of our great Soviet State, subject to arrest and a vague prison term.

  In those years, no one knew why Jews were being allowed to leave the Soviet Union, while no other ethnicity—not the Georgians, the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, the Belarusians, not even the native Russians could step beyond its iron borders. Beneath their dutiful Communist veneers, there were those who thirsted for the forbidden West, and envy fanned their centuries-old anti-Semitism. False reports of murders committed by people with Jewish last names began flooding newspapers and evening news. Bank robberies and small petty crimes that never took place were unequivocally committed by Jews, so that in addition to having to state our nationality as Jew on the fifth line of our passports, we could barely finish saying our last name before the comments started pouring in. Sometimes there would be an “Oh,” or an “Aha,” but most of the time people were very sympathetic, especially face to face. As soon as I said “Lena Kabelmacher,” people wanted to give me the benefit of the doubt: “Are you sure you’re an authentic Jew, or did your mother sin with a Slav?” Ludmilla Nicholayevna, my third grade teacher, complimented me by saying that even though I was a Jew, I didn’t act or look like one, and that was why I was so well liked by my classmates. To carry such honor upon my young shoulders brought me enormous happiness indeed! We certainly weren’t your stereotypical Jews, or so the Russians said, “because you have light hair and small straight noses, and because you’re clean and good looking and because you’re not petty and dirty and don’t steal other people’s money.” Although we didn’t know any truly stereotypical Jews, we believed that somewhere out there lurking in the corners of our building, hiding in the alleyways, stealthily creeping up our water pipes, were those real Jews, the dark-haired, crooked-nosed thieves who made us all suffer and accept this hatred as due justice for their sins. And we looked for vestiges of them in our friends, our relatives, ourselves. That’s too Jewish, we’d say, or what a Yid she is, about someone who was ill-mannered or ungenerous.

  From the moment we heard about the first wave of Jews leaving Russia, beginning in the early 1970s, not a week went by that my parents did not argue over the imaginary
pros and cons of living in America. Since almost nothing was known about the West, these pros and cons were direct quotes from Yakov’s letters. It was three years since he settled in Chicago, a city famous in Moscow for gangsters and high crime rates. But in his letters Yakov painted a picture of paradise on earth. One such letter took a particularly vicious hold of my mind and grew, as it were, into my own odd fantasy of a capitalist empire:

  Dear Sonya and Semeyon,

  Forgive me for such a long absence, but America is a very busy country. It is a sad business indeed that I have no time for our venerable Pushkin. My Russian has deteriorated and I can’t make a frog’s legs out of English. Americans treat us like we’re mentally impaired or possibly deaf. They’re always screaming at us, but no matter how loud they are, we still don’t understand them. Katya takes classes at the local community college, but they don’t help. I tell her she needs an American lover to immerse herself in this barbarian language, but she doesn’t laugh at my jokes anymore. Only our Valerichka has become fluent and is now socializing with real-life Americans. Katya and I have turned into his children. We depend on him for everything—grocery shopping, bills, and ordering food in restaurants, and so now he’s embarrassed of us. What’s the world coming to?

  But these gripes aside and the recent shooting on our block, America is an extraordinary place, full of happy surprises. Just the other day we found a blue satin couch in perfect condition right behind our building in what the Americans call their garbage dump. This garbage dump is full of wonders, and we are constantly examining it in case someone might have thrown out a valuable chest as we’re drowning in old shit from Russia that Katya refuses to throw out. She suffers from the nostalgia disease that afflicts all the other sentimental immigrants we drink tea with, and whose nonsense I have to endure because Katya says we’ve become misanthropes. Nostalgia has not afflicted me in the least. All I need to do, if I’m feeling slightly nostalgic, is visit a place called the supermarket—an enormous store that has no analogue with anything we had in Moscow. You can buy meat and vegetables and toilet paper and a toothbrush, and whatever else your heart desires. It is so enormous one could only compare it to a Soviet hockey stadium, only with aisles. There is so much of everything you want to tear your hair out, and bow your head to the Capitalist devils!