By the sixties, Moscow, like an oak, had added another ring to her center—the Automobile Ring Road. If you happened to find yourself driving along one of its four asphalt lanes in 1975, you would bear witness to a luminous sight: white outcroppings like a new species of meadow mushroom had sprouted in semicircles around preplanned courtyards, imposing their lucid, indelicate physiques over territories marked for future construction. Our new residential districts—the mikrorayoni—once villages of a hundred inhabitants, were now being zoned for a hundred thousand.
The people were saying goodbye to their crowded, peeling kommunalki, abandoning their dowdy one-room flats in pockmarked, cinderblock Khrushchevkas, moving out to the city’s nine-, sixteen-, twenty-five-storied frontier! And in 1975 my family was moving with them. Lucya, the kids, and I joined the tide of optimists picking out Yugoslavian wall units, Polish bedroom suites, Bulgarian kitchen cabinets to fill up the expanse of three whole rooms. In the kitchen, atop the new semi-automatic washing machine that Lucya tried to domesticate with a piece of macramé, stood our German Grundig shortwave radio. A Japanese stereo set squatted proudly behind the glass of the Yugoslavian stenka. Trade relations between the Eastern and Western blocs were on the up. The word “détente” was on everybody’s lips. Out in orbit, the astronauts of the Apollo mission and the cosmonauts of Soyuz linked up their two spinning crafts in a weightless space tango. News of this great cooperation was broadcast to us on our Horizon television set, on which months later we would watch Ford and Brezhnev, speaking as if his mouth were stuffed with sausage, fail to reach an agreement on cruise missiles and backfire bombers. It couldn’t last, of course, all this mutual cheek kissing in Helsinki. By the end of the decade the party would be moved to Afghanistan.
But all that was still years ahead. In the summer of 1975, I had a different sort of fragile détente to attend to. For years now my mother and I had adhered to a delicate truce of our own—which is to say we were “getting along,” which is to say we were not discussing politics. Florence no longer remarked that socialism was a wonderful idea in theory, and I no longer answered that so was flapping your arms and flying around the house for exercise before breakfast. In the end, the schism of our truce was precipitated not by affairs of state but by that most Muscovite of impasses: the apartment question.
“Not for me” was what she said. “I’m perfectly fine where I am. I can manage.”
I can manage. A phrase much favored by my mother, along with There’s no need to make trouble.
“No, you can’t manage,” I said. “Or maybe you can, but why should you have to?” I reminded her of the previous month, when I had twice taken her to the hospital after a herniated disk, acquired in the camps, had induced near paralysis in her leg. “And if the pain comes back and you can’t move?”
“I won’t be any closer to the doctors if I’m out there in the sticks.”
“You’ll be closer to us, to me—that’s what I’m telling you.”
She was still occupying the same cramped communal apartment that the two of us had lived in since 1956—when she’d returned from the camps, and I from the children’s home.
“I can’t walk up all those stairs.”
“The buildings have elevators!”
“No, no…I’ve seen those places. Very low ceilings. I’ve lived my whole life with high ceilings.”
“But, Mother, you’ll have more space, not less. You live in a high-ceilinged closet. Everything’s stacked on top of everything else. There’s no room to hang a picture! Two steps between the lavatory and the kitchen. How can you think?”
“It suits me fine.”
If it was the money, I told her, I would be more than happy to put down a payment for a one-bedroom cooperative for her in our building. The offer was disingenuous, I admit. Not because I wasn’t willing to pay for a co-op for Mama, but because I knew perfectly well that she had money for it herself. I knew this because, two years earlier, when I’d asked to borrow a little cash for our own down payment, Florence had stunned me by producing, as if by the rub of a genie’s lamp, half a dozen fat rolls of hundred-ruble notes—almost four thousand rubles—spooled so tightly and rubber-banded with such asphyxiating force that to get all that paper flat again required the use of a hot iron. She told me firmly that it was not a loan. “Am I an Egyptian that I need to be buried with it?” she said of my promise to pay her back.
How had a sixty-five-year-old retiree living on a skimpy state pension maneuvered to save such wads? She would have claimed it was by living on nothing but sardines and black coffee, and almost never buying a new coat, and getting the same pair of shoes resoled winter after winter. But how had she obtained the money in the first place? That is a more interesting question, and the best way I can begin to answer it is to say that, after two decades in post-Stalin Moscow, my mother had built up for herself a rather lucrative sideline.
Her day job, until she formally retired at the age of fifty-five, was that of a third-level sales clerk in a bookshop, the House of the Book—or, more specifically, the smaller annex that winged it, known as the House of the Foreign Book. It happened to be one of the only spots in the city where one could obtain foreign literature—dictionaries, English translations of Pasternak and Chekhov, as well as popular paperbacks by Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Hailey, Erich Maria Remarque. Also, English textbooks of the kind much in demand by the ambitious mothers of a new generation of adolescents, the MGIMO set who were driven to class in black Volgas. The overdressed, competitive wives of the new nomenklatura, eager to launch their children into diplomatic posts and careers that would require them to know “proper English” unbutchered by the national schoolteachers, who taught it without ever having heard it spoken aloud.
The job in the bookshop paid next to nothing, but it gave Mama a chance to show off her skills. She always knew how to spot them, the women in imported knee boots strutting in for the first time in search of primers and phrase books, and Florence would lead them politely to the dim back of the store where she could wax on about the advantages and quality of various textbooks, allowing herself to demonstrate by reading a few lines from the books in her flawless English, until the mothers ventured to ask about her “history” and she, smilingly, gave them the very abbreviated version—along with her telephone number, should they “have any questions” about the book they’d bought. After that would come first the invitation to tea. Before long she was tutoring students privately every night of the week, with a waiting list growing longer by the month. On Sundays, while I sat cramming for my own college entrance exams, my mother was making her rounds of the well-appointed apartments atop the Lenin Hills, arriving with mimeographed lessons and leaving with cash. Her vinegary verdicts on the homes she visited were always delivered in proportion to the solicitous attention she received from her clients. Privately, she mocked her patrons’ offers of French cognac and Dutch chocolates, ridiculed the husbands’ peasant habits and the wives’ lyceum pretensions, rolled her eyes at their lacquered furniture sets and their ikebana flower arrangements. Of one client, an approved Kremlin physician, I recall her remarking, “I can’t say much about her medical skills, though her doctor’s coat is specially tailored so the pockets are nice and deep.” None of these people were, in her opinion, “real communists.” All the real ones were dead.
But even these tart judgments—shared, I’m sure, only with me—were really a measure of nothing more than her own delight at her long-belated independence. She was not these people’s servant anymore; she set her own hours, chose the kids she worked with, and quit if a student did not apply appropriate seriousness to his studies, all the while rolling up her blue, purple, and apricot ruble notes into tight little bundles that she stuffed in her wardrobe between the bedsheets and towels. Her Americanness—the very difference that had once set her so fatally apart—was now the key to her freedom.
Was it this freedom she thought I was trying to deprive her of?
“I
don’t want to move out of the city.”
“But we aren’t trying to move you to some village, just closer to us. Closer to your own family. Aren’t you tired of sharing a bathroom with eleven people?”
“I’ve lived through worse.”
“If anything happens to you, I can’t promise that I can be there every day. Not if we’re on opposite sides of the city. I work! Lucya does too.”
“I have my neighbors. They’re decent people. No one yells, no one drinks. And I don’t like the kinds of people who roam around those outer districts.”
“What kind of people? They’re regular people, like us.”
“You don’t have to tell me….I’ve seen them…ordinary workers, drunkards…those whole neighborhoods…a complete absence of culture. No theaters, no bookstores—it isn’t living, it’s vegetating. It’s some kind of punishment.”
“You won’t be much farther from the center than you are now. We live right by a metro stop. And neighbors are not the same thing as family. This is a good time to buy—and let me remind you, Mama, you are not getting younger.”
“Do you plan to bury me already?”
I talked myself hoarse, to no avail.
—
ALL OF THIS SHOULD have given me ample warning of the territory I’d be entering two years later, when we went from discussing my mother’s move to the exurbs to a journey of far greater distance. A few things had changed by then. I had gone from being a promising doctoral candidate to being another Jew denied a degree, and I had finally understood that whatever fresh breezes of cultural change I’d whiffed would never mask the stench of my country’s rot. Like many, I had allowed myself to hope, and had been made to pay for my optimism.
And then, just as fast as my horizons collapsed, they opened up again. Bushels of American grain, imported to shore up the embarrassments of our kolkhozes, were now ensuring my family’s unmolested passage out of our suffocating confinement. Never could I have imagined that my mother would pose the greatest barrier to my departure.
“Hasn’t everything already been discussed?” she said, innocent-eyed, each time I asked her if she planned to come with us to America, or, as she called it, “that place.” So consistent was her avoidance of the word that anyone listening might have thought she and I were still arguing about deporting her to Moscow’s suburbs. “Mama, we’re not leaving without you.”
“No, no.” A curt head-shaking dismissal. “My life is where it is.”
“I can’t just let you stay here, all by yourself.”
“I can manage.”
“That isn’t the point! We’re applying for the documents. We’re set on leaving. Do you understand what that means?”
“I’m not planning to get in your way,” she said, as if all of this was just an unpleasant misunderstanding. “Whatever papers you need me to sign, I won’t put up a fight.”
This last ludicrous barrier to immigration was still on the Soviet law books: every grown adult wishing to emigrate needed his or her mommy’s or daddy’s permission in writing. I had her consent but not her cooperation. One afternoon, she arrived at our apartment to sign the papers that would allow Lucya and me to leave the country.
“Mother, this is your last chance,” I said. “You’ll be parted from me—from the kids—forever. Is that what you really want?”
I could see she was visibly aquiver, in spite of all her restraint. I didn’t care. I was done playing nice. I wanted to rattle her.
“Is it?” I demanded.
The Berlin Wall was still eleven years away from falling. Jimmy Carter was president. There was no Gorbachev yet, no perestroika, no porous borders, no Skype, no frequent-flyer miles. To leave was to leave. To go was to stay gone.
But from Mama I got the silent maneuver again.
Fury was not the feeling it provoked in me. Not rage, either. Something deeper than rage. Something unleashing itself from under all the civilizing restraints of upbringing. I tried to cover it up with empathetic listening. “What am I asking you to do that is so horrible?” I asked her.
“What—tell me—will I do there?”
“You’ll have a pension, just as here.”
“Sit on the dole, twiddling my thumbs. Here I have my work, my students.”
“You’re sixty-seven! How many more years of work do you have left? There’s more to life than work, Mama. I’ll take care of all of us.”
“It was never my intention for you to take care of me!”
“But I want to!”
“Why are you persecuting me like this?”
“What am I doing?”
“You want to turn me into an invalid!”
“I don’t want to turn you into anything.”
“You want to make me useless. So that no one will need me.”
“That’s not true—I need you, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Trying to take away my independence. Do I not deserve at least this, after everything? Have I not earned the right to a little freedom in this world?”
“You call this being free? Living in this country, with its lies and hypocrisy, these execrable quotas…”
She knew, of course, of my being denied my doctorate, and her eyes were powerless not to show it even as her lips could not help uttering their beloved phrase: “I’ve lived through worse.”
I could hear the kids in the living room, where my wife was keeping them away, my daughter asking why Papa was yelling at Grandma. Panicked, Lucya came in and tried to make a hasty peace between us, but we were careening blindly now, not to be stopped. “—This garbage,” I continued shouting, “that we are told to eat from morning to night…eat with a big grin on our faces…I am throwing away my life here!” I screamed. “My life!”
“It was never my plan to prevent you from leaving….”
“You’re afraid to go back, is that it?”
“Stop it!”
I could see I’d hit an artery.
“You threw away your life, and you can’t bear it….”
“I will not listen to this….”
You can’t bear going back a failure! I wanted to shout at her. You can’t bear admitting that all your exalted ideals, your so-called principles, all your struggles, everything you gave up—that it was all for nothing!
This was not, however, what I said as I stared into my mother’s frightened blue eyes—those bottomless eyes that in spite of having lost some of their vividness with age remained the focal point of her face. To say all this would have required a callousness and cruelty of which even I was not capable.
What I did in fact say was less courageous, though possibly no less hurtful to a woman in an already fragile state of mind.
“Do you want to die alone, Mama? Because this is what is going to happen. You will die alone in that miserable little room you love so much, a stone’s throw from your ‘theaters’ and your ‘culture’—die just the same, and no one will notice, or knock on the door, until someone’s cat begins scratching on your door because of the smell. Do you hear me?”
“I will not let you!” Her voice was trembling now, as her eyes began to brim with angry tears. “I will not let you force me to give up everything I…I…” But she couldn’t go on. She fled from the room, from me, out the front door, before I could think to run after her.
She didn’t wait for the elevator. How fast was she bounding down those stairs to get away from me?
When I heard the hubbub a few landings below, I did not at first understand what had happened. From the echo of voices in the stairwell, I did not immediately make out the stifled moans of my mother.
By the time I reached the landing on the seventh floor, there were two people trying to help her up—a couple about to enter their apartment. The bearded husband was lifting her by the underarms, while the wife held Mama’s right foot in her hands as though she were picking up a cracked egg.
It had been a bad tumble, though Mama herself did not seem to realize this. “I’m perf
ectly all right,” she was insisting between growls of pain. Maybe she thought her fall, frightening and painful as it was, was only an embarrassing slip. She would not meet my eyes. I came in on the other side of her and draped her arm around me. It was as weightless as a child’s. “It doesn’t look right at all,” the woman said, releasing her ankle. Inside the torn nylon casing, Mama’s foot was swelling like a frankfurter on a skillet. When I touched her heel, she let out a loose howl of pain.
The ancient Greeks believed it was the effort to escape one’s fate that led one directly to it. And so it was with Mama. Her worst nightmare had arrived at last: she’d become an invalid.
In the first weeks of Florence’s recovery, the act of hoisting herself up onto crutches parked by the foot of the sofabed was an ordeal of such backbreaking labor that there was no chance of her returning to her old room on Chekhovskaya. They couldn’t risk it. In his living room, already in the midst of being dismantled and packed, Julian had made a semi-permanent bed for her on the foldout couch. Here she would remain encamped like a refugee while the family prepared for their own wandering journey without her.
In spite of this inconvenience, everybody in the apartment was solicitous and accommodating. In the mornings, her nine-year-old granddaughter brought her breakfast on a tray—buckwheat grains, black tea, pain pills. Julian, defeated, no longer hassled her about coming with them. His eyes still flickered with frustration and guilt whenever he asked her how her foot was healing. The same went for Lucya. All that awkward doting attention made Florence feel like a patient in a mental ward. Only little Lenny, diving into her lap on the armchair, gleefully making noise while his mother tried to hush him “so Grandma could sleep,” was immune to all that enfeebling politeness. And so she loved him the most.
The Patriots Page 59