by Emily Rubin
Alexi broke the silence. “She said you brought those bras for us to sell.”
“How could you lie to him like that, Amalia? You made your son an accomplice?” I said. “I should call the police.”
“What about your citizenship test, Stalina? You don’t want anything messy to interfere with becoming an American.”
My citizenship hearing was soon. I wanted to be an American. Amalia hated me for this. She was like my mother and held tightly to her nostalgia for “Mother Russia.” I was furious, but I still felt sorry for all she had been through.
Survival by betrayal was for our family and
friends love with a feral scalpel.
This line from one of my father’s poems came to mind. I understood and could almost forgive my complicated friend, Amalia. In any case, I needed a place of my own; as roommates our time had come to a close.
“And those porcelain cats of yours…” She stopped and spit into the sink.
“What about them?”
“Don’t worry, I would never touch those ugly babies of bourgeois indulgence.”
“Bourgeois? What about all your glass miniatures?” I said.
“You can see through glass; there is nothing hidden. It is open and honest, like a peasant. Porcelain is for pigs,” she replied. “You are such a traitor.”
“The porcelain is beautiful and lifelike, and those brassieres were my last month’s salary from the lab.”
Alexi had started to back out of the kitchen. “I’m sorry, Stalina. She told me you brought those bras to help us pay the bills.”
Soon he would have to start shaving. His mustache had started to grow. It was just a scraggly line of hairs along his upper lip. It looked as if someone had cut off a bit of frayed rug fringe and stuck it up there.
“I don’t blame you, Alexi.”
Amalia sat down.
“I am moving out,” I told Amalia after Alexi had left and I heard the door to the basement slam shut.
“Where will you go, Princess America?”
“I’ll live at the motel.”
“Ungrateful capitalist!”
“Better to be a thief?” I asked.
“Those are Soviet bras; they belong to us all. By the way, I spoke with Olga this afternoon. She said to call her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You did not give me a chance; you were so upset about your silly bras.”
“Those are my bras. The money is mine.”
“Get out of my house.”
I opened my pink wallet and pulled out three twenty-dollar bills.
“Here, take some Andrew Jacksons, seventh president of the United States, my adoptive country.”
“He killed a man in a duel for saying something nasty about his wife.”
“You studied for the exam?”
“The test is stupid. They ask you if you have ever committed a crime for which you were not arrested.”
“It’s a trick question,” I said.
“I take survival very seriously,” she added.
“And what about stealing? That’s a crime.”
“I guess I would have to lie to pass your American citizen test. I’d trust a liar less than a thief. Call Comrade Olga.”
I took a breath and remembered that Amalia was also a child of the siege, only she stayed in Leningrad with her parents when I was sent away to Camp Flora. Many people perished around her. For the duration, she did not wear her makeup. Face powder was used to fatten up scraps of wallpaper to make gruel. People would stare at the mark on her face, and that’s when she would steal a watch or a ring. The black market was stronger than ever during those nine hundred days.
“A diamond ring could get you a loaf of bread,” she once told me.
“What’s the sixty dollars for?” she asked.
“Partial rent—it’s only the first week of the month. Take it.”
I went to pack my bag. The stairs creaked as I climbed, and my sneakers sounded like a hungry baby bird as they hit linoleum. Shoes with rubberized soles are a wonderful invention. With them on, even when I am feeling low, my feet are up.
My room, my terem, had a single cot and a bedside table with a lamp with a monkey eating a banana on the base topped with a yellow and white striped shade. When I first moved in it made me laugh. Everything in the house was oddly thrown together. The cuckoo clock. The one wooden blue chair in the kitchen. Nothing matched. Could it be that everything in the house was stolen? Many of the things I needed to pack were on a set of shelves Amalia made for me. The shelves were separated and propped up with various objects: a cement cupid figurine, a broken stereo speaker, and several flowerpots. I slid my suitcase out from under the cot and opened it. It was empty except for one of the bras that Alexi had left untouched. Size 85D—in America that’s a 44D. A good-sized brassiere. He’d removed the porcelain cats from the cups of the bras and tucked them into the side pockets. I was glad they were safe. I wouldn’t sell this bra. I might use it for decoration in one of the rooms at the motel. A “Lingerie Fantasy Room” would be very enticing, I thought. My nose tingled. There was a tickling remaining scent of home—Petersburg—lingering in the shadows of the suitcase.
I began removing things from the shelves. On top was the photograph of my mother and father on the porch from when I was thirteen. The glass in the frame was covered with a thin film of dust. I drew circles in it revealing my mother’s hands, then her face, under the dust. A tear fell from the corner of my right eye and landed on my father’s face. I passed my thumb through the droplet to clean the rest of the glass. I had never noticed before that my mother’s right index finger was bandaged, and there was blood seeping through the gauze. I don’t remember my mother cutting her finger, but it was probably still throbbing when the picture was taken. She made a cherry pie the day the photograph was taken. Maxim visited and ate pie with us. Amalia and I played cards. My father read his leather-bound copy of Julius Caesar, the same one I was packing from c shelves. As Maxim walked up the steps of the porch, my father read a quote from the play, never lifting his eyes off the page.
Brutus, I do observe you now of late.
I have not from your eyes that gentleness
And show of love as I was wont to have.
You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand
Over your friend that loves you.
* * *
“Good evening, Leonid,” Maxim had said that evening as he came up the steps. “Reading your favorite play, I see.”
My father did not answer.
“Hello, Maxim, would you like a glass of tea?” my mother asked him.
“Tea, thank you, Sophia,” Maxim said to my mother.
My father said nothing, got up from his chair, and went into the house. Amalia had put down her last card, winning the hand. “Let’s play another,” she said.
We played, but I was distracted and lost the next three hands. I could hear my father pacing and my mother rattling pans in the kitchen. Maxim sat on the steps and smoked cigarette after cigarette. The smoke filled the porch. My mother stepped through the smoke cloud with Maxim’s tea and a piece of pie. She pulled the cigarette from his mouth so he could eat, and he watched as she drew the smoke into her lungs and released it around him. He devoured the pie but never took his eyes off her. They walked off the porch into the evening, sharing another cigarette. Amalia won another hand. My father stayed inside. My mother returned alone. In the meantime, I had finally won a hand.
“You girls should be in bed by now,” she said.
“Stalina finally won. One more hand so we can tie,” Amalia pleaded with my mother.
“You’re a good friend, Amalia. Now go to bed, girls,” my mother said.
“Where’s your father?” Amalia asked.
“Asleep in his chair,” I told her.
My mother went inside.
“Girls, come in now. I’ll let you skip your baths if you go right up to bed.”
We left our playin
g cards and went upstairs. In the living room my father was unconscious in his chair with his teacup knocked over in his lap. There was a stain on his pants where the liquid had soaked into the worsted wool. My mother was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, smoking another cigarette. I could not see her face in the shadows.
When we got upstairs, Amalia asked, “Your parents don’t touch anymore, do they?”
I could not remember the last time I saw them touch each other.
“They don’t need to touch,” I told her.
“Everyone needs to touch,” she said.
* * *
I finished packing and went downstairs. Amalia was in the basement with Alexi. They were having an argument. I picked up the phone to call Olga in Russia, but the smell of cigarettes and gardenia perfume on the receiver made me sick to my stomach. Bacco was waiting in a car to take me back to the motel. My new home.
* * *
I reached Olga from the office phone on the first try. She had been to the rooming house earlier in the day and learned the details of my mother’s passing from one of her roommates.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I told them I was you,” she said.
“Who did you speak with?”
“Ludmilla was her name. She said she thought I was shorter and had darker hair. I told her I had only recently become a blond and was wearing heels.”
“I remember Ludmilla. She had the cot across from my mother, and her son used to bring her chocolates.”
“Is he married?” Olga was constantly on the lookout for men with connections. She continued, “Chocolates at the salon would be nice for treats.”
“Ludmilla never had the heart to tell her son that the chocolates gave her indigestion. She gave them away to the nurses and kitchen staff. My mother used to complain that Ludmilla got special attention because of the chocolates. She told me, ‘They gave her an extra piece of chicken the other day. Maybe you could do something for me, Stalina?’ That was when I gave her the toilet tissue and gifted the brassieres to the nurse.”
Olga explained, “Ludmilla told me that evening noodle soup with fish balls was served in the commissary for dinner. When the bowl was placed in front of your mother, she picked up one of the balls with her spoon, flung it against the wall, and screamed, ‘Capitalist pigs! They hoard the caviar for themselves and let us eat this slop!’ The nurses tried to calm her down with a cup of tea. She apologized for the bad behavior and assured them she was actually fond of fish balls, but had been possessed by a bad memory.”
I told Olga, “Mother must have been thinking of the time when Nadia’s parents were giving a party and served caviar. She left the party and went behind their house with a full mouth. I ran after her, thinking she was ill. She spit out the caviar and said, ‘I feel like I just sucked the cock of a KGB operative.’ Nadia’s dog, Trala, came out and started barking at us. ‘Are you the house informant?’ she said and spit at the yapping poodle. ‘That would figure.’ ‘Mother, it’s just a dog,’ I said. Then a stray cat with a split ear crawled out from under the house and began to lick the caviar from the leaves of the hydrangea where it had landed. We went back to the party, leaving the cat picking at the bits that got caught between her claws. ‘That must be Ezhov; he was known for licking Stalin’s ass,’ Mother said about the cat. ‘Mother, it’s just a stray cat,’ I assured her.”
Olga described how she’d been told. Mother’s roommates had returned from dinner only to find her standing at the edge of her bed facing the picture of my father—the one with the shovel. With red lipstick she had scrawled these lines on the starched white bedsheet:
The last time we were
Together we watched as the ice cream
Slowly dripped onto our daughter’s finely manicured hands.
I don’t care for chocolate, but it is ecstasy for her.
The hysteria of you is a charm
Not mine alone.
I cannot protect you from the Sun,
But you can love us all.
This was another poem of my father’s we found amongst his things. According to Ludmilla, the roommates stood by their respective cots, chanted the words, and were soon dancing around the room swinging in one another’s arms.
Frieda, who has one leg shorter than the other, got up on her cot and challenged the room, “In what year did Leonid write that poem?”
Many knew my father’s work; I made sure his poems were passed among other poets and friends.
“If I know, do I win something?” asked Talia, the shy one who had long gray braids.
“It was like we were children again,” Ludmilla told Olga. “Then the nurses came and made everyone go to bed. Your mother refused to have the sheet changed, so with the words draped over her body, she went to sleep, fully dressed.”
Olga went on to explain how the rest of the night unfolded. Lights-out was ten o’clock. Around three in the morning, Ludmilla heard my mother talking. She had taken the photograph of my father off the wall, laid it next to her on the pillow, and was whispering to it.
“Is everything all right?” Ludmilla asked my mother.
There was no answer, but my mother continued talking to the photograph. Ludmilla heard her crying and was about to get up when my mother sat up and reached her arms out as if to embrace someone. Her face was filled with a big broad smile, and then her eyes closed. She fell back onto the bed, barely making a sound. Ludmilla waited for my mother to move, but she remained still.
“Ludmilla said it was as if someone had come to greet her,” Olga said.
I wonder who it was. Maxim? My father? It was a relief to hear she was happy about whoever or whatever had taken her to the other side.
“Could it be that you get to spend eternity with the person you truly love?” I asked Olga.
“Now wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants. Having to wait till you die to be happy. What a silly plan,” Olga said. “It would be nice to have some happiness while we’re here.”
I had nothing to say, but I thought about how nice it would be to spend an eternity with Trofim.
* * *
As I spoke with Olga, the weather changed dramatically. The temperature dropped and the rain turned to icy snow. Three geraniums in the window box under the office window, surprised by the cold and ice, went top-heavy and touched the dirt. The whitening branches of the pine trees looked very Russian.
“Is there snow in Petersburg?” I asked Olga.
“What a question, Stalina. There’s been snow on the ground since October,” she replied.
I heard a dog yapping in the background. “Is that a dog?” I asked.
“That’s Neptune. I found him near the Neva by the Admiralty, shivering in the cold.”
“Neptune?”
“He fell into the sewer. It’s a miracle he survived, so I thought I’d give him an impressive name. He’s actually very small.”
“It’s a big bark he has. Are they keeping the metro stations warm?” I asked.
“Yes, of course, like always, and we still go there to meet after work,” she said, “like always.”
She laughed, and I cried.
“Stalina, why don’t you come and retrieve your mother’s things? You don’t have to give anything up. Just come.”
“It’s too soon. I am trying to be happy here.”
“And what about here? Many things will never change, but everything feels different. That’s almost like happiness.”
“Here it is about the pursuit of happiness, and that is what I want.”
“You could do that anywhere, Stalina.”
“The motel brings me happiness. It’s mine now.”
“Did you kill your boss? Did you marry him?”
“Did you know Nadia is here?” I asked.
“Did she have her boss eliminated? I heard she has adjusted to America very easily.”
“She arranged for me to have the motel; she’s in the business.”
“You, beholden to Nadia. Stalina, I thin
k you should come home. You don’t want her to own you.”
“She’s letting me do as I please. Olga, you could open a hair salon here,” I added.
“We both have our hands dipped in darkness, Stalina. You with Nadia, and I get my supplies from the black market. Everything they do happens behind a door, as they say, and my beauty salon provides the perfect façade. I always have plenty of hair spray, shampoo, and polish. Otherwise, my business would be nothing.”
“It’s not so different here, but I like the motel life. It suits me.”
“Send Nadia my regards. I never thought you would be friends.”
“It’s not about friendship, it’s about business.”
“Stalina, where should I mail your mother’s things? Tell me quickly, I need to take Neptune for his walk.”
I looked out the window and saw Svetlana’s crow digging in the snow under the pine trees. “I have a kitten named Svetlana,” I said.
“Only one? What’s the address, Stalina?”
I picked up a card from the front desk and read the address to her. The Liberty Motel, 345 Windsor Avenue, Berlin, Connecticut, 06037. Mr. Suri’s and his brother’s names were still on the card. I crossed out their names and wrote “Stalina Folskaya, Manager/Designer” and added “Rooms for the Imaginative” underneath.
* * *
Olga called me back the next day.
“Bad news, Stalina. I can’t send the ashes.”
“But it’s my mother. Did they find out you weren’t me? People die away from home all the time.”
“She was home, Stalina. You are the one who is away.”
“You just need a certificate of death—the rooming house should have it—and an affidavit from the crematorium stating the ashes are those of the deceased.”
“It’s not that. Someone else picked up her ashes.”
I was not sure I heard her correctly.
“The rooming house said your mother had a visitor. A man.”