Mother Winter

by Sophia Shalmiyev

  I want you to stand out in the cold and pine for my windows to open, Mother.

  XV

  I met my future stepmother for the first time in a Leningrad subway station when I was in second grade. Luda was a twenty-year-old transplant from a small Ukrainian town, painted with shiny scarlet lipstick and heavy eyeliner, prowling for adventure and male generosity. Instead of finding easy fun, she got hit on by a single father in a fake fur coat, thirty-five kopecks in his pocket and an empty fridge in a communal flat. She soon discovered he was a Jew from the Caucus region, which solidified his endearing outsider status and confirmed that she had not hit the suitor jackpot, but since he was less of a drifter than she was, it didn’t matter.

  For his and Luda’s first date, Dad hand-sewed a pair of black velvet bell-bottoms and designed a pullover with billowing sleeves and white piping to match. He worshiped the Beatles and managed to create outfits from scratch based on their well-cataloged changing tastes. He sat in a chair facing a wall at a short enough distance to make his shoes curl up in the front because he saw in a magazine that the Beatles wore ankle boots that didn’t lay flat at the tips. He had photos of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marcello Mastroianni on his bedroom wall. He took self-portraits that he printed and developed in our bathroom. In the black-and-white photos, he wears a striped V-necked sweater and a fedora, cocked sideways atop his mop of black waves. His mouth is slightly parted, and he holds up his chin with a fanned-out hand, like Rimbaud.

  Once my mother lost her parental rights and moved back in with my granny, I was to be raised by a man who was trying to put some miles between him and his draining divorce. Gabriel was in love with every woman he ever bedded, it seemed. He was promiscuous, but he would never be called a slut, and he didn’t become a social outcast because he couldn’t commit to any one lady. I try to lie to the women he is seeing about his fidelity, his whereabouts, his intentions. I can’t keep all their names straight.

  But how I loved all of the grown-ups’ fossils; the remnants left behind by my dad’s ladies. I cleaned up after them so that his sort-of full-time girlfriend, who became my stepmother, didn’t find other women’s underwear, photographs, handwritten notes, and clumps of hair in the drain.

  One time I couldn’t keep a story straight and it led to Luda coming home to confront one of the other women. She came into the kitchen where I was eating alongside my dad and this random mistress, who wore Luda’s house slippers and housecoat. She saw the slipper dangling on this lady’s foot as she nervously shook her crossed leg back and forth. “You slut!” Luda screamed, and kicked the shoe off the woman’s foot so hard it somersaulted in the air and landed by the window about eight feet away.

  Luda charged at her and began ripping the robe off her body. The lady wore nothing underneath. I had been trying her on for size to fit into the many compartments of my mother-wanting imagination. It was jarring to see this would-be caretaker fighting and losing her dignity in front of my dad. It was a girl fight. A tired, old, dime-a-dozen kind of fight over a man, going all the way back to when they both had to leave their childhood to be courted or ignored. Girl competition can be refereed easily. The slut will never win. She has no credibility. She gets no points. A group decides who the slut is by singling her out, kicking her out of the tribe. Once she gets the smell of the competition out, Luda will wear her robe again in a sad triumph.

  × × × ×

  Luda was a seamstress. Her mother ran a garment factory and taught her how to operate a sewing machine at an early age. My father convinced Luda to move in, and soon after, he helped her buy an industrial-size sewing machine so that she could work from home. When she left the house on errands, I immediately sat behind her sewing table and began turning out my own projects. I managed to break the machine almost every time. When she got back and asked me why the needle had snapped off or the thread was tangled up in the bobbin, I shrugged and refused to admit to any wrongdoing. I thought that her return home was the biggest inconvenience. I was practicing being the lady of the house—I was lost playing mother.

  A sewing machine is like a mother bent over, cradling her pregnant belly, with the round bobbin inside firmly attached: moving, beating, fluttering, and spinning out a new life. I spent long stretches of time sewing what I imagined were perfect garments only to find out that the bobbin had run out of thread a long time ago. The ghost stitch on top was useless on its own; it didn’t hold without the bottom stitch. The bobbin is much like the uterus, holding a baby of new silky thread. It demands ongoing repair and replenishment; its umbilical cord pokes out to connect with the needle above.

  The summer before I turned nine I fantasized about having a sewing machine of my very own. In June, during the white nights, the whole city of Leningrad was drunk on the heavy scent of blooming lilacs; the boozy light of a never-dark sky seemed to liquefy all the purple bushes in the squares like Vaseline on a camera lens. The gauze of endless daylight and that bright perfume in the air kept me up at night, staring out of my wide-open windows and eventually falling asleep satisfied by the vision of a little companion sewing machine to the one my stepmother used.

  In September, the Iron Curtain parted temporarily for my ninth birthday. I received a plastic German sewing machine from my father and Luda. They surely pulled strings to procure it during the Soviet era of black-market dealings. I became preoccupied with stitching things together: anything, even paper at first. When a friend would come over and try to tell me a story or play with me, I ignored her; all of her words were muffled and spun through the whir of my motor and foot pedal furiously plowing through projects. I was making contact, willing things to go together, marrying shapes and creating everything and nothing.

  × × × ×

  When Luda first came into our lives she was four months pregnant with twins by a nameless man from her previous relationship. I was in second grade and slept with wet braids so that my boring stick-straight hair could be curly on the weekends. Luda said it made me look like a little wild monkey and did her best to groom me into a girl-child, but I mostly wanted to be in the animal kingdom.

  I trapped mice in jars at my boarding school and took them on the train ride back to Leningrad with me. If it was a nice day I entertained my captives, opening up the tall casement windows facing a busy street and singing with my arms stretched out, like I had seen the abundantly painted ladies perform their arias at the theater with my father. I also dragged dingy alley cats on my way back home from the park and begged Luda to adopt them. Somehow, she allowed this as long as the new feral pet could be cleaned up.

  We would tie cloth around their paws to protect us from their gray, curved claws and soap them up as they wailed and writhed in the tub. When one of her favorite strays managed to escape as I left for school one morning, Luda thought that I had stolen her for myself, as a secret pet to keep in my dormitory. Decades later, she still doesn’t believe that this cat could not be domesticated, that she left willingly.

  Luda miscarried the twins a few weeks after moving in, right on my dad’s bed. Strange women hovered around her as she cried. One of them gave her a shot that made her contorted face go slack.

  I stayed behind, wiping her forehead with a cold towel by the light of a darkroom lamp. Red on. Red off. The room is full. The room is empty. And so this woman is to be reminded each month after month from then on.

  × × × ×

  My father started shooting and printing photographs once Luda settled in. He got an enlarger and periodically set up our communal bathtub as his darkroom. He strung up a rope with clothespins that pinched the corners of pictures in which they posed for the camera, she in a G-string and he in a tight tank top and bow tie. When I looked at them, repulsed and intrigued by their games, they seemed shy and amazed at themselves for being so brazen, breathless from barely running ahead of the self-timer.

  XVI

  Born in January 1956, Elena was a true Russian winter mother—you’ll never know how bad she’ll be, or when she�
�s coming or going. January is about exiting the longest night of the winter equinox. Darkness almost all day. Opposite of the white nights of a Leningrad summer.

  She still shines to me when I’m that kid, chest-deep in virgin snow on my way to the subway station, black morning sky, little body drawing a map like a caterpillar crunching forward on a pale leaf.

  Mother winter is all surface beauty. Want to lick her like buttercream icing, like glistening egg whites beaten for a birthday cake. But cold slows us down and makes us sleepy until we are high and hallucinating, then give in and take a permanent nap.

  Toward the end of his career, Cézanne ended up leaving blank, unpainted areas, giving the eye a place to roam, to invent our own endings, or take refuge in his not-knowing. He became interested in deliberately unfinished work, in space as “substance.” These new landscapes and portraits left whole corners of exposed canvas, only the primer showing through like an air grate with unexpected blasts of musty heat from a speeding train.

  Cézanne’s previous technique of layering on thick, protruding brushstrokes that were like a fox chasing its tail in the snow, with each paw print leaving deep indents in the ground, slowly receded and revealed what gets left out, what isn’t there to be found, what is lacking, and therefore what is endlessly fascinating because it lives in the gaps.

  The Hermitage has a Cézanne I especially loved as a child depicting his mother and sister. It’s called Girl at the Piano and looks like a solemn tea-stained dream of a young woman in a white dress sitting sideways at a piano with the mother doing a bit of sewing on the red divan to the right. I hated to play my violin and would have chosen to learn the piano if we could have afforded one for me to practice on. Because I wished you were the peaceful and settled type of mother who could sit long enough to hear me play for her, this painting was what I practiced telling people you were really like underneath.

  No one at school dared to probe me about your absence. Friends or teachers weren’t willing to ask for the truth and hear my lies, but I practiced many stories about you for years to come anyway, this still being my favorite narrative—that you’re happy just to be in the same room with me and you have nowhere else to go, that I can play stunning music without practicing, that you watch me become a grown-up.

  Cézanne died of pneumonia, his lungs sinking in a swampy chest. He insisted on working out in the fields for hours after a heavy downpour had begun and was revived after the initial collapse. He intended to keep tilling the earth after a painting session with a live model but was never able to leave his bed again.

  My mother has never seen Girl at the Piano with me. This would be the ultimate collapse of the fourth wall.

  × × × ×

  Once he won the bureaucratic paper war and had sufficiently proven that he wasn’t able to get equitable employment and was persecuted for his culture, religion, and skin color in Russia, my father became obsessed with acquiring local art to take along with us overseas. He had a number of painters come to our apartment and spread out unframed canvases along our wall-length shelving in the living room. My father said that most of them were alcoholics and sold their paintings cheap and fast to get more vodka. I decided to tell people that my mother was an artist after that. I took whatever true fragment of that sentence could be useful for my fictional story and ran with it. I added it to my visions of the future “us” captured so eloquently by Cézanne’s hand.

  In the weeks before our departure for Vienna as the porthole to our permanent home, with our citizenship officially renounced, barely eleven years old, I got sent out to fetch a small painting of a bird coming back to her nest. The egg was a real pearl set into the chunky oils.

  I had to travel from our place on Bronnitskaya to Nevsky Prospect, a major thoroughfare on one of the islands in the center of town. I found the right guy at one of the stalls and gave him all the money I had on me. Staring at the protrusions on the canvas, I managed to get myself lost after missing my home subway stop. I stood in a doorway outside a station I didn’t recognize, clutching the painting under my arm and contemplating how to get the extra fare I now required, when a teenage girl who tapped the side of her bicep with a folded umbrella approached me with offers of a place to stay; she explained what she did with old men for money and how well I would do if I came away with her—a runt offered a trick tit.

  I stared at her umbrella as though it were an exposed lung rhythmically pumping with oxygen. It began to rain, and she invited me in for shelter. Her eyes were static. I ran to the metro and begged a stranger to give me the fare.

  My dad was napping on the couch with a bent elbow over his face when I finally arrived with the painting. He was completely spent from his recent battles to secure us visas. He had thrown out his back as usual when stressed.

  A few months before, Dad had managed to go overseas to visit his best friend, who got married to a Japanese man she had met in Russia and was able to send my father a visa immediately after her citizenship was established. Dad saved up a considerable amount of money from seeing therapy clients privately in our flat. He had been robbed and threatened before and felt that he could invest this money by purchasing a car in Japan and having it shipped to Leningrad. He would learn how to drive on his own somehow.

  We brought a couple of friends and a bottle of champagne to the loading dock to pick up his white Toyota when the pod finally arrived. One of them had driven a Russian Zhiguli and was quite lost dealing with this car, the steering wheel on the right instead of on the left. It was a bold move on Dad’s part. He could have been killed by thugs for having a foreign car. Or if he were assumed to be richer than he was, I could have been taken for ransom.

  We all feared the car would be stolen. Instead, Dad wrecked it. He totaled it in a head-on collision driving to Moscow for his final American consulate meeting, where they would either offer him a refugee visa or reject his file without the remaining evidence he had to bring forth. He walked away from the car crash with minor bumps and bruises. He had fallen asleep at the wheel, too exhausted to pay attention, pushing on for what he thought would be the last of the final pushes.

  When Dad talks about our history together, he will say that this is his favorite part of our legend. It’s the part where he comes back home to Leningrad on the train. He tells me that everything is ruined, that he failed, and we may not get to leave for America after all. That he wrecked our Toyota and there is no insurance, that we have nothing left, the bargaining chip had been bargained away and we should bear down into the hopelessness. Lacking any ambivalence, I will embrace him at once and announce that “We can always get new things, but I can never get a new dad. I only care that you are alive.”

  I have seen ten snowy seasons by now. I am about to enter fifth grade. I have an unrequited crush on a timid boy whose mother looks soggy and slurs her words. I have been left home alone for years and continue to get to boarding school and back on my own without question. I don’t care about leaving my country. I haven’t been held by my mother in months and months. I don’t need more things or people to miss. I can no longer imagine who or what is to be missed in a blind alley toska. Elena is a north wind madness kicking me around.

  I suppose I do long for my mother, but being her copy is like having the flu in the morning, early-onset dementia in the afternoon, and a post–car wreck concussion at night.

  XVII

  When I am taken from Elena for good she will walk through the dust of what used to be a country of war victory parades, crimson carnation wreaths, state-issued wool underpants, tombs of embalmed Communist party leaders, ration coupons, children dancing around sunlamps, Vanka Vstanka tilting dolls, Olympic bear souvenirs, forbidden denim, and rock music. The dignity in the collective. Kvass and beer keg stations parked on the way to the subway, a drunk and sober line formed in the morning each time the weather warmed up.

  The frigid November day my father and I are exiled as political refugees from the Soviet Union he is thirty-two years old. My
parents’ age difference is almost the length of a typical fetal gestation: forty weeks.

  A pinched daughter who leaves her mother in the fall will have a cold German winter awaiting her arrival in Vienna in 1989. Will have a passport that is made only to be taken away at the airport, a refugee status for a refuse with a suitcase of sardine tins and cured sausages, and a new children’s Bible stuffed in her hand by the heel-of-the-bread-faced missionaries. Will have a mother who was asked no permission to have her bad seed taken from her cracked shell, now buried and gone in the wet muck leaf heap. But the daughter wasn’t stolen goods if the mother didn’t notice her absence for some time.

  A sensible leaver, Susan Sontag allows her son to be raised by his father, purposefully, unlike my mom, so that she can think clearly and write about art, Russia, class, morality, photography, and death. Sontag only kept photos of people whose work she admired on her desk instead of family portraits. I will do the same for some time to come, arranging a sleuth wall of connections that may seem incongruent to Elena’s heritage, but any thread of a woman on the margins is an incantation of motherhood in our case. About exiles like mine, Sontag wrote that “What followed in the wake of 1989 and the suicide of the Soviet empire is the final victory of capitalism.”

  I will land on the winning side of a distasteful history with aisles of cheerfully arranged products to wander around and play hide-and-seek with your shame. No class, no country, no family pictures to be had. Nothing familiar to eat. New slogans. Eat me.

  What does one get as the first meal after your child goes missing? What would I force myself to consume if my children were stolen away from me? What was the first bite of food that touched my mother’s lips after she was stripped of her maternal rights? The last supper is an elaborate ritual, a feast leading to the death of a future god. Mine would have to be bar peanuts with a cheap beer. My mother, I imagine, ate deviled eggs or peas.