by Sigrid Nunez
He tells me stories about the crazy things addicts he knew back in Odessa would try. Spread a little shoe polish on a piece of bread. Let sit a few hours. Scrape off the crud. Eat the bread. You’ll get a buzz. Shoe polish and insecticide can also be rubbed into the scalp. You shave a little patch on your crown and pull a plastic bag over your head to speed up the effect. Vadim is contemptuous of such desperate measures. Drugs are for fun, to make yourself feel good. How can you feel good doing something like this? Even when he didn’t have the money to buy drugs, it was easy enough to drive into the country and steal the poppies yourself; they were not hard to find, blooming illegally between rows of conveniently tall corn. It was risky business: You could get shot in those fields. But the fields of East Harlem are dangerous too. Vadim can handle it. (“If I have to be afraid of everything, I cannot live.”)
He finds another dealer, closer to home, through an attendant at a gas station he uses, and soon he is shooting up once or twice a week: sometimes coke, sometimes heroin, often both. He doesn’t want his arms to be covered with telltale tracks, as they were in Odessa, so he shoots into the veins of his hands and wrists. One of the scars on his right arm is from an old infection caused by a dirty needle. Now he is scrupulous about keeping his needle clean.
And from what I can tell, so far at least, drugs have been less harmful to Vadim than his other demon. Like no small number of Russian men, he is able to chug an entire bottle of vodka. Russian style. Two bottles a night, no problem. He was often drunk. And when he was drunk he was often violent. So many close calls with knives and cars, he might have been a cat. But before he could use up all of his lives his wife took things in hand. For once the two enemies, Vadim’s wife and Vadim’s mother, saw eye to eye. Before he left for America, he had to get clean. He kicked the drugs on his own, but for alcohol they dragged him to a doctor.
The first thing this doctor made him do was sign a paper absolving the doctor from responsibility. Vadim was then told to open his mouth, which the doctor filled with spray from an aerosol can. Vadim had to hold the liquid under his tongue a few minutes before swallowing. Shortly after he swallowed, his skin turned fiery, his temperature soared but soon dropped back to normal and he was himself again. That’s it, said the doctor. You can go home. But by this simple means a cure had been worked. Were Vadim to start drinking again any time in the next five years, he would die.
A hard-to-believe story. First of all I want to know whether this doctor knew about the suicide attempt Vadim had made. Surely his wife and his mother knew about it? For his part Vadim finds it hard to believe that I have never heard of this cure, so well-known in his country. Some people choose to have an ampule of the drug injected into their flesh, but Vadim had shied away from this method, said to be riskier than the aerosol spray. (It is the first time I hear him speak of a risk he deemed not worth taking.)
But do people who drink after this treatment really die? I am skeptical about the whole business. Vadim says he knows of people who drank and died, but he knows of others who drank and survived. You could never be sure. More Russian roulette. For the moment he himself is playing it safe. But is he cured? He does not seem so to me, at least not in the twelve-step way that we would understand. If you asked me, I’d say he was only waiting to get that five-year sentence behind him.
His wife often screams at the top of her lungs, “You are nothing but a no-good drugger!” To her husband, further proof of her insanity. “Why she want to tell everyone about it? In Russia she scream like this, and in Russia, believe me, people think very badly of druggers.” I warn him that people in Brooklyn have their prejudices too. Vadim’s wife does not drink or smoke or take drugs. More than a touch of regret when he reports this. Life is more fun when others share our vices. “Will you shooting with me sometime?” he asks with a kiss. And yet he is displeased when I mention once that I’d drunk too much at a bar the night before. Nothing worse than a woman drunk in public, he tells me—oh so Russian. He is not pleased when I light up a cigarette either. Of course, it would have been one of the things he adored about his wife when they met: her clean living. The sinful are always moved by the love of the pure.
He carries a photograph in his wallet. “Mother, Father, and I.” Mother is plain, Father handsome as a dream. And Father it is who holds the child—their only child (who didn’t let his father down by being a girl)—holds him off to one side, so that Mother has to crane her neck to see. They are both gazing down at their son, concealed in a dark blanket that appears remarkably coarse—burlap, it looks like. Completely concealed: no small fist sticking up, no adorably rounded baby brow.
I can get almost nothing out of him about his parents. Of his father he will say only: “My father was not my father, he was my friend.” Of his mother: “She thought only about me.” Perfect parents, in other words. I don’t say what I think, which is that if your parents were perfect you do not grow up as an animal, you do not become an alcoholic and a junkie, or grow so sick of living by the age of thirty that you try to kill yourself. But Mother and Father are dead, and I am touched by Vadim’s loyalty. (And if parent-bashing is out, there is always the Communist party. For every hardship of his life Vadim blames the Communist party.)
His father was wounded by shellfire in two separate actions during the Second World War—that war that Vadim informs me was won by Russians, with only a little American help. (Out of respect for twenty million Russian dead, I hold my tongue.)
Drink was his father’s demon too, and if he had another addiction it was women. “My father was like me. He always had a lot of women. He could not live without it.” I want to know what his mother thought about that. Vadim says he doesn’t know. But were your parents happy? I persist. He says he cannot court them. Judge them, you mean. Yes, sorry: judge them. He smiles. You always could understand me.
You always could understand me. He says this to me all the time. You always could understand me. Tender. Grateful. His English may be broken but he is safe with me. That I am the one who taught him English—our common language, and the language of survival in the new country—is something he never forgets. But the closer I become to him the stronger my desire to speak to him in his own language, and to have him be the one to teach it to me. Impractical. Between his job and his family Vadim has never had much time for me, and much of the time we are together we are silent. When would we study Russian? You are always hearing people say things like,“I learned French in cafés and in the street,” “I learned English in bed,” but I don’t know what they are talking about. The only way I know of learning a language is by studying—hard and methodically.
Vadim also wishes that I spoke Russian. He has dreams in which I appear speaking it fluently, as I used to appear in my own dreams speaking German. To think that neither my father nor my mother ever showed any desire to teach me his or her language. A terrible withholding, that now seems to me.
Love and language. The immigrants speak of the pain they feel when their children insist on speaking only in English. Disdain for the mother tongue: a plague among the immigrant youth. “When my son speak to me in English,” one Korean man says, “it is knife to my heart.”
There are teenagers in Vadim’s neighborhood, friends of his daughter’s, who were born in Brooklyn of Russian parents and who speak almost no Russian, while their parents speak almost no English. How can they understand each other? But I know a Chinese-American man who grew up speaking no Chinese, though that was his mother’s only language. Somehow she raised him.
He is smart, my Vadim. He was my best student. “Vadim is polyglot,” one of his classmates used to say. But it wasn’t easy for him to learn English. He had to work hard. He worked harder than all the rest. Even after our class had ended, when most of the others simply gave up, he kept working. Studying his dictionary while waiting in line in his cab at the airport. Practicing with his passengers, asking them questions, getting them to help him. At night, before falling asleep, he holds imaginary dial
ogues with me in his head. At home, of course, and almost everywhere in his neighborhood, only Russian is spoken. I am the only native American he knows. “You are my America,” he says.
Someone’s America—me!
Constantly fretting over his inadequate English—or is it English itself that is inadequate? So much weaker and blander than Russian, English seems to him. Wherever the fault lies, all he knows is that he cannot express himself fully. If only I knew Russian! Yes, I must learn it, and quickly too. For unless I know Russian, how can he describe how he feels about me?
He says, “Caress me, beloved.” He says, “I very love you.” And: “When you put your head on my breast, my heart runs out of me”
Whenever I praise his English he says, “I did it for you.” Not the whole truth, of course, but it cannot be denied: He studied hard for me.
“My dear, can I say, ‘I dote on you’? It is correct?” “Can I say, ‘I adore you’?” “I search my dictionary for ways to tell you.”
My heart runs out of me.
In all those years, my father never learned enough English to tell me how he felt about me.
Father and son had much in common. Father worked all his life for the Odessa port too, doing exactly the same work the son would eventually do, though he was never held back in his job, as Vadim would be, for having married a Jewish woman. Father and son both drank a lot and smoked a lot, and they both married very young and had one child, and they both fucked around incessantly. A father who, on occasion, when procuring a woman for himself, had procured one for his son too, which may be one of the things Vadim meant when he said his father was not his father but his friend.
I want to know about the women but Vadim says there is nothing to tell. “I don’t remember them. I did not love them. It was nature for me to want them, because I am man, but I did not care about them. I wanted only one thing from them, and after it I was saying, Get away from me.”
And not a hint of shame in those blue wolf’s eyes.
Was I wrong, or did I detect a change, a slight diminution of passion, once we had become lovers? Often it seemed to me that for Vadim much of the thrill might have been in the chase. I knew he wasn’t just boasting when he said, “I wish everything I want in life was as easy for me to get as woman.” Had he thought (hoped?) that I (the American, the schoolteacher) would be more of a challenge? In the beginning, there was something almost fearful to me about his tension—that way the expert seducer has of convincing you that he will suffer something dire if you don’t give in to him. Nervous, hungry, and tormented were words he used to describe himself. And: “You must make up your mind about me soon, because I cannot stand it, I am like dog in box!” Once we had become lovers, though, all the anxiety seemed to fall away. A calm descended. More attractive to me than ever was he calm, and it was I who became nervous, hungry, and tormented.
I want to know about his wife. Olga the ogress. “I don’t love her and she doesn’t love me.” He is always threatening to leave. She is always begging him to stay. Why, if she doesn’t love him? “Because she is like dog on harvest.” What? “It is Russian saying.” Surely something amiss in the translation, but I get it (“You always could understand me!”): When a person doesn’t want something, but doesn’t want anyone else to have it either.
It was his wife’s idea to come to the States. Vadim, who says he never had any desire to leave his homeland, jumped at this chance. His wife cried for days when he told her she should go to America without him. How could she go without him? How would she get by in the new country? Who would support her and her mother and daughter? That was a man’s job, she reminded him. There was her son who would be going along, but Volodya, though just out of his teens, already had his own wife and child. “She was right. She would be lost here without me. In the end I could not spit on her.” And now, he says, “I am alone. I am really all alone in this country.” What can he mean? Doesn’t he live with his family? Doesn’t he live in Little Odessa, surrounded by brother Russians? “No Russians,” he says. “Only Jewish.” His wife’s people are not his people. “In family, only I and my daughter are Russian.” What? Svetlana is Russian, Vadim explains, because she has a Russian father. But to Olga Svetlana is Jewish. He has Russian law on his side, she has Jewish law on hers. But the laws don’t matter, Vadim says. “All you have to do is spend five minutes with my girl to know she is Russian.” Simple test.
Both Volodya’s natural father and Volodya’s wife are Jewish.
Unlike Olga, Vadim had no friends or family to welcome him here, and he can think only of those he left behind and whom he may never see again. Something else to hold over his wife’s head. “She is not homesick. She does not suffer. Only I.”
Who is right about nostalgia? Goethe, who cursed it as useless and morbid? Or Herder, for whom it was “the noblest of all pains”? I don’t know, but I always suspected that it was as much for Vadim’s sake as for her own that Olga wanted to get away from Odessa. Hadn’t he said himself that he lived like an animal there, always in trouble, always fighting? Perhaps Olga believed that America could tame him. A new land, a new life, a second chance for both of them. If that was her hope she was to be disappointed. Vadim says that when she came home one evening to find him nodding in the dark, and she turned on the light and saw those bloodshot eyes, she clutched her head with both hands and backed away from him screaming.
Vadim doesn’t believe his wife was thinking about him. He says she never thinks about him, she thinks only about herself. And: “She keep me only because she need money, and she doesn’t want to be alone, without man.” I say what seems to me obvious, but Vadim sets me straight. “Here in America you can be forty and still young. But we are Russian and we are not young. My wife is old woman, she is grandmother. She is not going to find other man now.”
Olga loves America—or at least her America, which means Little Odessa. Not the housing project, of course, where things have changed only for the worse since I was a girl, and the talk is still all about getting out. (If it is true that many Americans have had to let go of the dream of one day owning a home, the immigrants still cling to it fiercely.)
Olga is thrilled with American stores. All the many kinds of stores, with never an empty rack or shelf—nothing like this in the Old Country. “She and my daughter, they shop and shop.” But since they can’t afford to buy much, it is mostly window shopping. They like to look and to touch and to dream. To Vadim it is ridiculous. “Why I have to come to America for this?” About one thing, though, he and his wife agree. They did the best thing they could have done for their daughter. “Here, she can go to college, she can be anything. She can have all what she wants.” Vadim is always happy when he speaks of his daughter. His faith in her future is unshakable. But doesn’t he ever worry about being a bad influence? The suggestion only amuses him. “No, believe me, one thing I know for sure, my daughter will never be a drugger. Because she see what happen to me in Odessa, and she is not stupid. My daughter will never touch drugs.” One good reason to think he may be right is his stepson, who hardly drinks, has never taken drugs, and is completely faithful to his wife. More than one way for a father to set an example. But later, when I have learned more about Vadim’s past, I will think it nothing short of miraculous that his children have grown up all right. I don’t think it was luck, though. I think it was Olga.
Vadim gets angry when he discovers that all the money he has earned and handed over to his wife is gone. He is trying to save. He wants to buy his own cab, or some kind of business, like a laundromat, as soon as possible. “I must think about future. I do not want to drive taxi for rest of my life.” He hears about another apartment, bigger, in a better neighborhood, and with a nice low rent. The people who live there now are willing to pass on the lease for a fee of ten thousand dollars. To think he can save that kind of money on his salary seems unrealistic to me. But he has the shining example of the man for whom he is working now, who drove a cab day and night for five years
and managed to save ten times that. I had forgotten. Those spectacular feats of getting and not spending that are part of the immigrant story. It really is another America. I try to think of anyone else I know who saves money. But all my friends are always spending, always broke, up to the limit on their credit cards, behind in their payments, dissatisfied with their jobs and their salaries, and always complaining. Of course they would like to have more money, but they would never work hours and hours at some lowly job to get it. One hundred thousand dollars. I don’t think I could save that in a lifetime, let alone five years.
Whenever we talk on the phone Vadim has his dictionary handy. One day when we are talking about his wife (once again he has decided to leave her), he says, “My wife is very—very—wait.” Rustle of pages. “Coarse? Rude?” “Gruff,” I suggest. “Yes, yes, rough. My wife is very rough. It is not good for me. I need a woman who is—” Rustle, rustle. I can guess the word before he finds it. “Tender.”
Was Olga never tender? Was there never a time when they were happy together? Vadim thinks back. Soon after their marriage, he took a job that brought him to the Far East, to Vladivostok, and Olga went with him. Vladivostok. One of those faraway lands with delicious names (Zanzibar was another) that I hardly believed really existed when I was a child, in those days before I knew how small the world really was. Vladivostok. Zanzibar. Pago Pago.