She started the engine and drove out of Alex’s driveway with a violent screech. On the highway we passed every car in our path with style, swerving masterfully around them, and rolled down our windows to feel the hot July wind in our faces.
Then looking at me from the corner of her eye, she said, “We’re all terrible people, but at least you’re taking your life into your hands and saying the fuck with everyone else.”
“Am I—then why did I get engaged in the first place?”
“Cuz we’re all alike, all trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons, who knows? Because Grandma buzzes in our brains like a well-meaning bee—”
“Don’t blame her—it’s my fault—ours. She can’t change her ways, we’ve always known that.”
“Yeah,” Bella sighed, “sometimes I think I’m a lot like her. I hate men as much as she does.”
“What do you mean?”
“I laugh at them in my head. I look at them, fawning over me, making fools of themselves, but do any of them know what goes through my head—do they have any concept of how smart I am. And this lack of realization on their part—their blindness, their stupid senseless dick-driven desire—makes me want to trample them under my feet.”
“No wonder Igor has been looking like a flat pancake lately,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, him, he’s not great enough to be spoken of in such a tragic manner. You see how marriage ruins beauty; remember how he gawked at me when we dated, slobbering over me, ‘oh you’re so beautiful, Bellochka, can’t believe you’re so beautiful, I’m so lucky!’ And now five years later—does he even see my beauty anymore?
“I don’t care, Lena, you hear me—I don’t care if he never looks at me. The point is that marriage dulls the senses and your beauty means squat—your beauty that had once meant so much to you when you were young is suddenly obsolete, like an old fancy towel you’ve used so many times it’s turned into a rag.”
“So why not have an affair?” I asked.
“Because affairs are overrated—banal, commonplace, and most of all boring. Am I so foolish as to think I won’t run into the same problems with a lover as I do with my husband? Sure, they court you when you’re a mistress and sure, it’s exciting, the way jumping out of a moving airplane is exciting, but it wears off—everything wears off—everything but the stage.”
“Do you think I’ve betrayed them? Do you think they’ll think I’ve betrayed them?”
“Two different questions! Am I supposed to answer that for you, I, who picked so abysmally for myself?” she exclaimed, impaling me with her eyes. “Only one thing I’ve learned—you can’t let what people say and think affect you. If he understands half of you, then you’ve already found something rare.”
“But I’ve been lying to him—sleeping with him while still engaged to Alex—”
“Details! Look on the bright side—at least you haven’t been sleeping with the two of them at the same time! That should count for something!” She burst into a generous, soothing laugh and infected me with it. All at once our eyes were watering and our stomachs contracting, our cheeks stretching as we laughed silently and then again with gusto, as if everything in the world had become hilarious: the windshield, the dashboard, the street, Alex, Mom, Grandma, my predicament, and Bella’s sad, sad life. And as I laughed harder and harder, keeling over, wanting miserably to cry, I thought about Bella, about a young life that seemed to have spanned centuries and taught one so little.
Pushkin, Arrogance, and Beauty
Pushkin, arrogance, and beauty conspired to alter Bella’s fate at the irascible age of fifteen. She had long fantasized about aristocratic men so struck by her looks that they would leap into Tsveytaeva’s illicit verses. She felt she should have been born in culturally superior Leningrad and believed, like all good-looking children, that the world was a land of well-meaning fairy godmothers and princes who would adore her, pamper her, and relieve her of the suffering others must endure. In the year we were to receive our permission slip, Bella had been courted by just such a prince: an older man whose age was somewhat of a question mark, who may or may not have had a wife, who may or may not have been a KGB operative, and whose name may or may not have been Nicholai. He lacked the features of a prince (in fact, put together, his features invoked the likeness of a goat), but being tall and surprisingly well-built for a Russian man, as they neither worked out nor refrained from vodka and fried salo (fried bacon fat eaten with the same regularity and enthusiasm as fried potatoes), and conversant not only in nineteenth-century Russian literature, but in sexually subversive foreign texts as well, such as The Interpretation of Dreams, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Lolita, one could safely say that he possessed princely endowments.
Bella met him at my parents’ “going-away” party for the Avenbuchs. Although no one could remember inviting him, he insisted that he had met my father during Gregori Margulis’s lecture on lattices in Lie groups, and thus obtained an invitation. This explanation was so laughable that it was instantly seen as a veiled threat.
Bella and I twirled to ABBA and Boney M., shook our knees to Elvis, closed our eyes provocatively like the adults to the Doors, but when her beloved Louis Armstrong burst into “I Say Tomato, You Say Tomato” Bella fully unraveled, becoming in her wild frenzy the dance floor’s sole proprietor. Other women stepped aside to grant her dominance, and the unsuspecting men mistook her childish antics for the demands of a grown woman. They came at her, these roosters with their feathers all riled, wanting to lead, to teach, to subdue her movements under their will.
Only Nicholai made no attempt to impinge on her dancing. He was of the verbal seduction variety. Spreading his arm leisurely across the sofa, he recited an entire stanza from Marshak’s translation of Taming of the Shrew, as if at once to laud her looks and criticize her behavior (a popular Russian male strategy for winning women’s hearts). And our Bella, who imagined herself the heroine of every novel, poem, and play, dissolved. Or fell in love. Or fell into that stage of adolescence I like to call premature deflowerment. For they had done it the very night they met on the staircase of our building, her back pressed against cold brick, and although it felt “horrible,” Bella believed she was bound to him, that “something beautiful” happened—beautiful, that is, between their souls.
Normally, after such an act the man would never call or pursue the woman—her submission to him would be deemed a grave act, proof that she was a blyat. But Nicholai embarked upon a serious courtship; he brought dazzling roses and tickets to the Bolshoi for my mother, hard liquor and Italian sausages for my father, oversized jars of Beluga and pillars of vobla (a salty dried fish that could only be considered a delicacy in Russia) for my grandmother. He invited himself over to dinner. He was too moneyed, too well-groomed, too finely dressed to be your typical Russian man. Only the KGB, my mother told Bella, have imported leather coats and fragrant perfumes on their chins. But Bella refused to listen. Nicholai had proposed that she remain with him in the Soviet Union, for by then he had learned of our plans. As my grandmother would say years later in America, the job of getting the whole family out intact was not for the weak, and so she, the Hercules of the Jewish people, had to apply all her muscles to transport my sister’s lovelorn head.
Bella wept, denounced the family, and threatened to commit suicide. With tragic aplomb, she ended it a month before our secret day. By the time June 2, the day of our departure, rolled around Bella had turned into a shadow of her old dancing self: a depressed little girl deprived of her prettiest doll. Despite her supposed sexual awakening, Bella seemed sedated, drained of her vibrant sensuality and budding confidence.
My grandmother blamed my parents for Bella’s incurable state; after all, for three years before we left Russia, my parents were divorcing one another. The word—razvod—flew like a sword in the air, none of us knowing where it would land. Even after they severed ties with their lovers, even after we boarded the plane head
ing west, my parents were still divorcing one another in Austria and Italy.
In Vienna we were greeted by handsome Israeli officers and brought to a gated mansion, which had been a sanitarium in its finer days. There had been terrorist attacks on Russian Jews in the city, and a new security policy stipulated that we needed to be “contained” for the duration of our stay, which in real terms meant being locked in a mental health facility. We were stuffed, ten families per room with bunk beds, and guarded by large Austrian women in white robes who used to guard the mentally ill. Sometimes a husband or wife slept beneath or above someone else’s husband or wife and the rules of privacy were ignored. In the dark, when the lights were shut off, you could see the silhouette of a woman’s slip and her jiggling breasts, a man’s white underwear and his black socks reaching for his calves. Bella and I lay awake at night, huddling next to each other on a narrow bed, listening to husbands and wives fight, to infants weep, to the groans of the old, holding pain inside their mouths, to my parents quarrel about the rest of our lives.
Vienna turned out to be a strategic stopover; we were allotted five days to decide whether to go to Italy, en route to America, or to take a flight directly to Israel instead. Moved by the beauty of the Israeli men, whose glistening brown skin, lean long bodies, and dazzling blue eyes burned holes in the anti-Semitic images Russia imprinted upon our minds, whose mastery of the Russian language seemed in perfect harmony with their divine faces and the paradise they painted of life in Jerusalem, we women became ardent Zionists, with my mother leading the pack. “We should go to Israel,” she urged my father, “it is the only sure way to escape anti-Semitism—to truly embrace who we are.” “Yes, yes,” Bella echoed (the men’s flirtatious gazes became her therapy), “it’s the only way I’ll ever be able to love again.” But my father was livid: “First you tortured me with America—now Israel!” he told my mother. “I didn’t leave my mother, my job, my friends, my life so that I could live in a Jewish desert—it may be Jewish but it’s still a desert with Arabs and constant war!” When my mother continued her protests, my father abandoned the language of reason and resorted to his favorite phrase: “Over my DEAD BODY!” My mother did eventually surrender. “No one wants your dead body, after all,” she told him on the fifth day.
It was during our two-month sojourn in Italy, waiting for our visas to enter the United States, waiting for my parents to end their war, that Bella’s sexuality surfaced again—or, as my mother liked to put it, “erupted.”
Italy was a hot sumptuous interlude, a simulacrum of a vacation from the Soviet regime, with no home to return to, only the consciousness of flight. The rest of our lives hung in the air like magnificent optical illusions. We could have applied for visas to enter any Western country—England, Canada, Australia, France, or we could have remained in Italy if the Italians would take us. But after much hypothesizing and poking in the dark, we followed the original plan that first stole our hearts upon reading Yakov’s letter—America! Only America took in Russian Jews without any pre-conditions, without demands for higher education, without questions about our age or skills. Our visas to the United States were practically guaranteed, for our status—as political refugees—elevated us into Cold War’s highly charged political realm. We were human proof of Soviet oppression, the unsuspecting players in America’s strategic battles with the Communist regime. Still, there was a wait. And for a people who came from a world where a contract, a document, a newspaper, and the words “truth,” “promise,” and “fact” had long ago lost their meanings, “waiting” became a euphemism for uncertainty, a joke God played on His most audacious dreamers.
Italy whispered of forgetting, of starting anew, of abundance, of untapped possibilities, but we couldn’t embrace even these quiet hopes; we had no money, no language, and no knowledge of where we would one day end up. Our nerves, strung like poorly tuned violins and snapping from the slightest irritation, prevented us from delighting in the grand vistas of nature and the ancient ruins of the Roman Empire. We sleepwalked through the crumbling Coliseum, the majestic Pantheon, marveled absently at the antiquity and beauty of the Roman Forum. We roamed its luscious, emerald terrain like phantom beings, invisible to the loud, colorful Italians streaming past us, invisible even to each other.
Our first destination was a dingy hotel in Rome, a red-carpeted remnant of antiquity that stank of mildew, piss, and rose water, and creaked under our feet. We were given one room for a family of five, but the exquisitely carved wooden chests and wardrobes dating back two centuries tantalized us with fantasies of Western grandeur. The bathroom was the centerpiece, an open space with a resplendent boudoir and only a velvet red curtain to offer a semblance of privacy. The hotel was paid for by Jewish organizations in America, who provided us with a minuscule allowance for which we were deeply grateful but which did not prevent us from starving. Having sold our belongings in Russia to pay off the KGB, we were then allowed to take a thousand American dollars per person and survive on it for an unpredictable period of time.
My mother wanted to spend the money on travel like the other Russians were doing; she had dreamed of Venice since her romantic adolescence, imagining herself in cafes by the water, or enfolded in the arms of some handsome Italian in the Gondolas. But my father painted a grim picture of our future in America: “You shall rot in poverty! You won’t have anything to eat or a place to live in your American paradise! Capitalism,” he held sternly, “requires money.” We knew plenty of unfortunates stuck in Italy for months, their money trickling away into the abyss of Western seduction, of bureaucrats in America and Italy mixing up documents, of relatives in Los Angeles and New York forgetting to sign some obscure page and thus prolonging the wait. My father cleverly played on my mother’s fears until he scared her into complete submission. Not only did she excise all romantic getaways from her mind but she denied herself, as did my father and grandmother, the delicacies of Italy: aromatic strawberry ice cream, a divine dish called “pizza,” and, of course, our long-awaited Western prize: “Coca-Cola.”
Every morning in Rome we drank coffee and ate delectable free rolls with butter. My parents ordered nothing else, and with shame blazoning on their faces, they surreptitiously stuffed purses and bags with extra rolls, knowing they would last us all day. We did not even have water on our trip to the Vatican. As we stared in hundred-degree weather at dead popes resting in tombs behind glass walls, we politely refrained from fainting; after all, if we could survive Russia, then we could certainly withstand a little Italian dehydration.
Through the immigrant grapevine, we heard that the secret to happiness in Italy was selling. Bring your dresses and shawls, fancy linen and towels, and your lingerie if you have nothing else because that’s where the real money hid—selling Russian goods to the Italians. So on a wide expanse of grass near a major avenue, parents and children and grandparents were selling their clothes, linen, matryoshkas, handkerchiefs, shawls, and cashmere. “Quanto Costa? Quanto Costa?” the Italians would scream at us. But my parents were poor salesmen. They spoke in judgmental tones of the indelicacies of selling, of pushing and deluding customers, of the impolite nature of asking for more money than what it originally cost them, and blushed at their broken Italian. “But I’ve worn that shawl,” my mother would whisper, “it’s Great-grandmother’s—I wore it to the Bolshoi, how can I sell it? It’s dishonest.” “I can’t sell this fountain pen,” my father would say, “it’s my only memento from college—it’s priceless.” Every morning they laid out my great-grandmother’s silk black shawls painted in scarlet and pink roses, white embroidered linen, sterling silver spoons and forks, and simple gold earrings the KGB security apparently felt were worthless, and every evening they returned with all the items still jiggling in their suitcase. Nor were my parents alone in their embarrassment, for our fellow countrymen were engineers, linguists, physicists, dentists, pianists, computers scientists, chemists, violinists, writers, teachers, and doctors, who scoffed at haggling and beg
ging, terrified that this might be a first glimpse of their future in America.
The only person who wasn’t humiliated by the process was Bella. She spoke in voluble tones of the necessity of survival and urged my parents to abandon their “girlish shyness,” “their communist views of the world,” “their persnickety habits,” and embrace capitalism with spiritedness and dignity, and feel, feel that acute sensation of being free! Grandmother championed Bella’s cause in private, but in public she only yelled at the poor Italians to stop groping her mother’s priceless linen; “Von, von poshli ot syuda,” she’d yell from behind the table as though she were dispersing a pack of wild cats. Only Bella, clad in white shorts and tight purple tank tops, lounging lazily behind the table with her long sturdy legs and full bosom on display, understood the art of selling. “Ciao, come stai,” she would say to Italian men, and the men would reply, “Bella, bella donna!” She would spread her flaxen mane on her bare shoulders and grin and nod without knowing what she was nodding to, and the men would write out phone numbers, attempt to embrace her, or propose marriage on the spot in Italian, while Bella would push an embroidered pillow in their faces and murmur “Grazie, grazie” as if the men had already purchased it. While my mother trembled at her daughter’s feats, the men flocked to our table like seagulls to fresh fish. By the end of those two months in Italy we had sold enough of our belongings to eat pizza and ice cream and drink Coca-Cola twice a week. I believed in those years that Bella could alter the state of the universe.
She had a miniature waist, womanly hips, a voluptuous bosom, and gorgeous healthy legs, Russian style: thick thighs, round knees, and tiny ankles. Not too tall, not too plump, and not too skinny, she was woman perfecto. Her features, although small and distinct, came together in almost superhuman symmetry so that she appeared at first glance, as she did on a prolonged one, to have a flawless face. Unlike my mother, whose strong voice and penetrating gaze made one feel that her features were merely the tools she used to express herself, Bella’s power was inextricably tied to her appearance. Her serene blue eyes floated beneath crescent lids, harking to the beauties of the Renaissance, and a perky nose reminded one of farm girls in the Russian countryside. Her beauty was strangely at odds with her rough-edged, rambunctious personality that thrashed like a prisoner inside a demure innocent face.
The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield Page 23