The Hermitage museum is like a glacier—we see only the peaks. What’s underneath is simply too massive to navigate. The secrets that are stacked away in the museum’s storage facilities are vast. And so are the lies to cover them up, like the known fakes they can’t admit to, or the poorly executed restorations that have to be accepted, or the German paintings that were looted by the Red Army, held captive until they were finally exhibited, but not given back to their proper owners, those most original of enemies.
There is a famous Soviet-era film, the name of which I forget now, that deals with the sadistic elements of coveting an embroidered lifestyle within the spartan and spare Soviet commitment to equality. In it, a woman who shares a communal space with a true daughter of the revolution gets a lesson about flying too high, her shiny earrings ripped out as she lifts her leg to roll up her silk stockings. The message is if you flaunt it, we got it, and you ain’t getting it back. Mother Russia is above parents, above religion, and definitely above Self.
Maybe only poetry can compete for first place in the Russian black bread heart. Think of what Lenin asked the peasants to do—to storm the palace and kill the Tsar—to move into his house, confiscate his prized possessions, and, theoretically, to oversee the redistribution of wealth. Most important, to restage the royal whimsies and heirlooms as a public museum, an ongoing humiliation, a warning to anyone who had once participated in amassing a fortune or openly strived to do so in the future. A synchronized coveting was to be our utmost indulgence. Unlike the new Russia of ostentatiousness without irony. The invisible banners these days seem to read: NOW, WITH PALACES FOR SOME.
During the Siege of Leningrad, Stalin decided to starve the people but save the art. The museum and archival staff took down the ancient statues from their pedestals and carefully wrapped them in burlap or whatever cloth they could find. Some families did not have enough wood both to make coffins for children who died of hunger and to keep the living warm, even after all of the furniture was broken down and burned for heat, after cherished books of poems were used as kindling.
Those who lived in the basement of the Hermitage, looking after the dead-eyed busts of Medusa and building frames around the billowy capes of Mercury, ate chalk and glue and stayed cold at night while these artworks without actual wants—empty guts, phlegmy lungs, slowing pulses—were as cozy and cocooned as newborn babies.
Fourteen years after the brutal conclusion of the Leningrad Blockade, “the stubbornness that possibly led to more deaths than surrender may have,” Great-Granny Hope used to tell me—Gentile to Jew, you were born in the same hospital where you would later give birth to me. The same pea soup–green walls of our bathroom, a popular Soviet-era color, were now peeling around the doorframes in the 1970s. Another reminder that restorations do not last; that erosion and loss are inevitable; that intentions do not prepare us for the sacrifices of actual doing; that walls are like people, either tended to, primed and coated in something shiny and new by the beloved, or left to crumble toward the abyss.
XII
Pushkin is a quaint little suburb of Leningrad where I attended an Internat—a specialized tuition-free boarding school that was a mixed bag of locals who used it as a day school, kids who went home to Leningrad on the weekends and whose parents could pop in any time since the school was only an hour and a half away, as well as orphans and temporary wards of the state with caring grandparents and social workers who used the socialized education system to get them an interview for a sought-after spot. The town was the first to acquire a rail service when it was the Tsar’s Village and the last residence of the dethroned blue bloods, later dedicated to the memory of the country’s favorite poet, a descendant of a slave who became a nobleman. Pushkin’s languid ponds and gardens aren’t very far from the grand summer palaces of the village of Peterhof—once similarly plundered by the Germans—where an intricate hydraulic system was installed to power marvelous fountains so the Imperial clan could cool off in the summer and find solace from the metronome of the city.
My boarding school had wrought iron beds, den mothers, knitting, ballet, violin lessons, cross-country skiing to get around, sketching ruins al fresco, wild strawberries in the woods picked under nets, snowdrops and lilies-of-the-valley, shoe covers on museum tours, oak leaf piles, hiding wet sheets, and running away to my mother’s place.
I was to live here from first until fifth grades and come home on the weekends and holidays only so that my dad, who had also attended boarding school, wouldn’t have to worry about bad kids or predators in the neighborhood, about feeding me dinner every night on a tight budget, and about my mother showing up at the house breathing out ethanol and telling unseemly stories to her latchkey daughter. I was expected to get the hang of the commute early on so that my father didn’t waste three hours of his Monday mornings to drop me off.
When I tell my father I am upset that everyone teases me at boarding school and around Pushkin because my butt shows if I lift my arms up in the air, he responds by getting me a new uniform four sizes too big. The year I began noticing boys I looked like they shrunk the school lunch lady.
He bought me white ribbed tights for special days and brown ribbed ones for every day, which were all a few sizes up to avoid standing in lines more than necessary. He put my future clothes under his bed. One day before the May Day parade he pulled out a plastic bag and struggled to put my good, white ribbed tights on me. I had grown, but he hadn’t noticed. So I walked with the crotch way too low on my thighs. It was hard to sit on his shoulders to see the procession of tanks and floats when I couldn’t spread myself wide enough to hold on.
A lesson to hug with my legs when I’m all grown up.
× × × ×
Our national regulation school uniforms were wool blends of chocolate brown. The aprons worn over the dresses were black for every day and white pinafores for special occasions. Our white collars and cuffs were to be removed with tiny scissors, washed, starched, ironed, and sewn back on every weekend at home.
Nothing and no one was allowed to stand out or be special. There were, maybe, two types of toothpaste, but there was no branding, no pictures to indicate a flavor. Toothpaste was medicinal—it served a clinical purpose to protect teeth from rot. Children in commercials did not delight in products that enticed them with ads. There was no bubble bath shaped like a cartoon character. There were no superhero toothbrushes. There was no good or bad soap. There’s just soap you use for hand-washing of clothes and soap you use on your body, usually once a week for both.
Laundry and bathing were events. In boarding school, we were taught what I remember as the face-pits-and-crotch mini sink baths. You were basically encouraged to scrub your face and rinse under your arms as fast as possible due to the unpredictable availability of hot water, and for menstruating girls, to wash down there. Unlike at the Internat, most people went to banyas, the communal steam rooms, to bathe properly by sweating the week off and getting a lashing with bundled oak leaves in soapy water rather than waiting on the shared tub in their flat. The communal aspect of everything, down to something personal, like hygiene, was to be cooperative; beaten and bathed into us as Soviets.
One of the girls in my dorm had orange-flavored toothpaste imported from Poland, and I would wait for her to go to sleep and sneak it out of her nightstand to carefully squeeze some onto my own toothbrush. It tasted like creamy chalk with citrus rind, and I slowly ate it in little cat-licks. I ended up sucking on the other girls’ toothpastes, too. Mine was powder, which was cheapest and had no added flavor to it.
I would steal black bread that the other kids left behind on the tables after a dinner of kasha and stuffed cabbage and save it in the front pockets of my apron. I would lay out these scraps on the giant cast-iron heaters in our room of twenty squeaky beds lined up against bare walls and let them toast up for snacks of croutons we called syuchari.
In third grade I learned that my teacher expected sugar. Tamara Yestafyevna certainly enjoyed a few lu
mps in her tea, but she also made sweet water, which she used to wash her blackboard. This made the chalk appear more vivid, gave it more traction, I suppose. Her board was actually brown and gleamed like a mirror. If you brought her a kilo you got on her good side. Our rations could never be stretched that far, and nothing could buy me out of hot ears on the way to the principal’s office or being called the smelly girl anyhow. She decided to not take down a pencil-colored poster that was obviously made by my classmates and casually appeared on the community board. In it, I was depicted on a pee bed, yellow ring, hair disheveled, and squiggly fumes emanating from all sides.
My teacher’s most productive punitive measure was to make us all stand next to our desks with arms stretched forward until whoever stole an object off her desk or did some other sneaky thing would confess. We had to collectively hate mysteries, learn to tattle for the greater good, be advanced sleuths, and suspect everyone of wrongdoing in the process. Sometimes no one would confess, and she was forced to let us go once the bell rang. I always wondered if it was me who was supposed to confess, if I had imagined being innocent, and rubbed my arms on the way to a mirror in the basement mudroom where everyone pulled on their boots for outdoor recess. I never asked the mirror if I was the transgressor. I took out my hidden chocolate and warmed it against my lips, pretending it was the brown lipstick my mother wore. I puckered and blended, then licked it off so no one would see me this way.
XIII
The inside of black bread is moist, acidic, and clay-like. The crust is coarse, the top of the brick shape is practically charred, and the rest is a copper brown. It’s cheaper than white bread, about twenty kopecks for a whole loaf. When I’m home, my job is to buy the milk and the bread. There are always lines and they are quite dull. The shopkeepers are never happy to see you and appear interchangeably exhausted and lazy.
At the dairy store, my two white galvanized pitchers get filled up from a giant vat of whole milk by a greasy tin ladle. The lids never stay shut on my containers and the milk spills fat, cloudy raindrops all over my tan legs, the wooden handles soaking with sweat.
Both the bakery and the dairy are just a few blocks down busy Bronnitskaya Street, where I grew up in a five-story ornate yellow stucco apartment building with frozen drainpipes and icicles menacingly dripping from green cornices. The rows of apartment buildings are all broken up by archways leading out into the shared courtyards I mostly avoided after losing touch with the neighborhood kids once I began first grade in Pushkin. Sitting on my windowsill, I would watch them and make little thimble-size cups out of the doughy part of the black bread. I roll chunks of the inner flesh into balls and press my index finger inside to make a mold that will resemble a vessel. Once I have four or five of these, I pour in the milk, barely a sip in each, and swallow them whole one by one, the milk popping inside the salty fake china I sculpted.
My father was honest with me about our lack of money, lack of food. We’d sit at our narrow kitchen table pushed up against the left-side wall, same as our neighbors had staged theirs, with the single window looking out over the courtyard, and talk about division and fairness.
“We have only this one piece of sausage,” he’d say.
In between us, on the table that our state-assigned flatmates don’t share, because they take their food into their rooms, is a white plate with a kielbasa, some mustard, a hunk of black bread, and a knife.
“I’m hungry. Do I get to eat it now?”
“It’s up to you.”
“Why is it in the middle like that?”
“Well, because you have to make a choice, like a mature person.”
“Can I have my own sausage, please?”
“This is all we got for now until I get paid again. You can take the knife and split it however you see fit. I can either stay hungry myself and watch you eat the whole thing, or we can do as God taught us, and share.”
“But then we will both still be hungry.”
“Less so. We feel our joys and our pains together. We share, to ease the burden.”
“Do we have any milk left?”
Realizing I can fill up on milk, I cut the kielbasa in half and give my father the piece that looks biggest, even if the difference is too slight to really notice. When we are done eating, my father gives me a kiss on the head and tells me to do the dishes.
× × × ×
I was a clumsy child. As I sneak more food, I drop a big jar of jam and it breaks, but only around the rim. I thought that all the slivers and shards were accounted for, picked out, but as I ate the preserved strawberries I felt myself accidentally swallow something sharp and hard. I sat on the balcony and faced the sun, preparing myself for death. I wouldn’t make it to fourth grade, use the microscope in botany class, shape marzipan out of almond paste, paint it with beet and carrot juice, and dip it in sugar until it looked like a peach. I wouldn’t share a sweet kiss at an open-air cinema with a boy who reminds me of Lermontov.
I assumed the shard would find its way to my heart, like a wet body down a swift and winding tube at a water park. I stared past the sun as it baked my forehead, nearsighted and without glasses. When nothing happens, I go back inside and tell no one about the visions of my demise, or the danger in the jar. I don’t throw away the preserves, but I don’t touch them again.
Later, my father threw a sedate party. Splayed out on the couch across a tightly packed line of my father’s dear friends from school, I wore a terry cloth jumper with big buttons on the front. The lady in a pencil skirt brought me a banana, a rare tropical treat, which I ate bit by bit, teeth scraping the fibrous, gum-numbing peel once the flesh is consumed. One of the women had my head in her lap, another had her arms wrapped around my torso, and the third played with my slippers—all impromptu babysitters who asked me with delight and sincerity about my scrambled-egg recipe and snuck me chocolates.
Before passing out, I read Pippi Longstocking, one leg swung over another to prop up the book, which I plucked from my uncle’s cavernous library. Pippi made up stories about her absent parents’ fantastical adventures: the father who was a brave captain of a ship and vanished at sea after a storm but would surely be back, and an angel mother whom Pippi did not remember but who reassured her, while Pippi was looking up at the sky, that she would be all right alone in the world. Like Pippi, I liked to pretend that my mother was watching over me, that she and my father had a higher calling in life—I imagined her as a great painter and him as a tortured poet—that they were benevolent creatures, remote and mysterious in order to serve a larger purpose for society.
Maybe children aren’t always children. Maybe it’s up to the adults to keep them so.
XIV
If your mother won’t stand behind you brushing your hair, saying—Look how beautiful you are, I’m so proud of you, don’t listen to a word those other miserable lost souls say, I know who you are, my strong, my brave, my lovely little girl, you’re nobody’s punching bag, God don’t make no junk and you’re my jewel of a prize who I waited for all my life—you get to choose whatever you feel like wearing no matter the price.
There were so many versions of this motherly love mantra I had told myself in the mirror as a small child braiding my hair every morning. I’d wake up extra early determined to French braid my dirty and unbrushed locks—black, crunchy, and greasy—into something that I could rescue while hiding the fact that I had no one to get me ready for school, no one to make me take a bath on Sunday nights.
As a girl, being unkempt and smelly as I was in my neglected state was a sin that boys got away with all the time. I braided my hair to protect my family and the dignity I believed was my duty to preserve until my arms fell asleep, until I made myself late for school.
I wouldn’t dare wake up my dad and any overnight guests he may have had, so I looked through their coats for the money I needed to get to school. If I couldn’t find enough I would panhandle. My strategy was to stand by the change machines at the subway turnstile and cry.
Eventually someone would notice a little girl in a school uniform weeping alone and came over to ask me what had happened to upset me. I would say that the machine ate my money and I’m desperately late for class. Most of the time I would get more than my fare.
Rush hour down the subway escalator is like an avalanche, a controlled explosion on the slopes. A tiny kid with a violin case, a backpack full of finished homework, and a sack of clean laundry she had scrubbed and dried on the line for the week ahead could get swallowed up. At times all I could see were people’s belts and crotches, behinds and hips, squishing me until the opening above almost closed up; until I couldn’t breathe and yell out for help, help down there, beneath being seen.
I ran away from boarding school and walked around looking for my mother instead of attending violin lessons. I skipped lessons regularly and lied about it to my father, who was jittery with shame after my recitals, signaling a future beating would take place behind closed doors with a smack upside the head. The unspoken rule was that if I didn’t use them to listen and play the notes, my ears were to be boxed. Most of the time I said goodbye to my boarding school teachers, waving my sheet music and my violin case at them, and walked around Pushkin kicking icicles out of drainpipes or watching people shop for dinner at the bazaar.
I was going to trap her into taking care of me, as though she just needed a reminder, as though she were simply having a bad day year after year and had forgotten how to move her hands from her closed eyes. I must have thought she would cry out with relief and tell me how exhausted she was from running around trying to get me back, how smart I was to read her mind and come to her at once. What sore eyes you have, mother dear.
Some freezing day in second grade I got off at her subway stop like a dog going on instinct. I walked over to her building complex and stood in the courtyard, shouting up at the gray concrete facades. I tried to search out her windows, but they were all the same. The dark squares looked like gaping mouths screaming back at me.
Mother Winter Page 4