I barely remember the day we didn’t say goodbye, shortly before the jubilant collapse of the Berlin Wall. We were in Granny Galina’s small foyer with coats layered on thick by the mirror to the left of the doorway. She kneeled down and cried, trying not to hug too tightly.
Granny looked up at my dad and begged him to wait a few hours, or until tomorrow, to give my mother a chance to turn up for a real farewell. “Until tomorrow,” my dad said, picking me up, worth my weight in wet feathers. And so, Until tomorrow is what I keep.
These days, I think of ma, a Japanese word that doesn’t have a precise translation but is roughly the “gap, pause, or space between two structural parts.” One can be conscious of a place, not as a hemmed-in, three-dimensional entity, but as form and formlessness coexisting as an interval, between breaths, between destruction and rebuilding, between resting and looking again.
Most Soviet apartments had inner and outer doors and windows as a method of providing both extra insulation and additional refrigeration. We stored our preserves and pickles in between doors or windows. There was a built-in shelf to the right as you came in through the heavy black door. No, there was a shelf to the left as you left. It stealthily held our winter hopes in jars.
The sours. The bitters. The salts. The brines.
XVIII
Gabriel makes many lists.
Like my father, I like lists because long explanations irritate me, and I enjoy crossing things off. Long explanations irritate me because I am still your child, impatient, never actualized as taller than your chest, looking up, hot face, waiting. I enjoy crossing things off because I have never been to your grave and I desire finish lines to help me know how endings can be achieved.
He writes down what we need to bring on our journey out of Russia. We forget those things, or we have to make more room for them, but can’t. We shuffle around the sausages in the suitcase yet again in an attempt to fit more preserved foods. We give away red leather-bound books that we had read many times over. What’s left of the rare stamp collection after a neighborhood boy my father once took under his wing rips off the priciest series. Uncle Chanukah gets our furniture, arranged and rearranged over the years along the maroon-and-gold wallpaper we hung ourselves. My favorites: the mirrored armoire where I hid away hard candy, and the desk my father sat behind doing paperwork as I sheepishly came in one night to ask him for a bandage, my badly sliced thumb behind my back, after using his shaving razor to carve out some velvet for a doll’s dress from a ring box I wasn’t to touch.
We keep our paintings, because the art means we are going to do much more than survive the journey ahead. My father has special crates built for them. We will have to check in at customs early, as they are to be shipped to more than one destination. A final destination yet unknown. No finale for our open-ended dyad. Bringing along Suzie—a cocker spaniel we bought shortly before receiving our visas—pointed toward a wishful abundance, an empty peacocking, but a good pose nonetheless. Gabriel didn’t have to hide yearning for status and standing any longer. He could Oscar Wilde–out to his fullest, embellish only everything worth desiring for in his impoverished state.
Our photo albums we forget on top of the wardrobe chest because we are too tired and frazzled that morning. If “the problem is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photograph,” as Sontag writes, our failure to bring along the albums would further remove us from our inheritance, our documented events. Our people would be alive in our verbal archive only. This diptych would have to be enough.
I guzzle down some Pepsi and it hits my nose better and harder than the American version ever will. We are ready to go.
We left you behind, but you were never invited.
During our customs inspection out of the Soviet Union Dad hid jewels in my ears behind a strategically styled shag haircut I hated.
“Gypsies keep gold and other valuables in their mouths,” he tells me. “Be lip to lip.”
He stuffed some foreign bills he had exchanged on the black market into the ski boots I wore, ignorant of their versatility. When he came out of the little examination room where he got strip-searched, he was gray-skinned and wild-eyed. He grabbed my hand and pushed on with purpose. He tucked his shirt back in, drew in some air, and petted Suzie, faking a brisk smile. We were lucky no one noticed the little mule with the currency, a future of conversions, shifting foot to foot.
We were given visas and one-way tickets to Austria, then Italy, and finally America because we were darker than the other Russians in Leningrad. Because he came over from the Caucus region and married a white Christian woman. Because I’m not Jewish according to the Jews, but I’m Jewish according to the Soviet Union. It is written so on the first page of our oxblood canvas passports with bent corners and a hammer and sickle framed by a golden wreath.
My father was once offered a prestigious spot as a psychotherapist soon after graduation. The human resources department needed his passport. They had assumed he was Azerbaijani, which was also part of his ethnicity. When the lady at the front desk came back with his passport and said the position had been filled, he begged her to tell him if it was because of the second thing marked under NATIONALITY. She didn’t make eye contact and firmly, yet gently, tried to shoo him away. He didn’t know if he was supposed to bribe his way out of being a Jew or if this was an instance where such a move could get him thrown out of the Communist Party, one more mark against a comrade on his official documents.
Our Soviet-Jewish passports would be given up for Alien IDs. Demean. Undermine. Obstruct. Abandon. That was our refugee cycle of airports.
Some exiled Russians have been said to die because of a shattered heart—hyperbole and melodrama are our enamel miniature brooches pinned on chests after the Lenin pins are stripped and sold off to foreigners itching for Soviet kitsch. It’s a collective toska. A longing for Mother Russia that can become fatal. Take me back or I’ll die. Loving one’s country, serving one’s country, dying for one’s country are all an honor and a privilege. These must have been great men, patriots. They watched with disgust as new maps were made after the Soviet regime was ousted, their country shrinking its borders, birthing prisoner countries they claimed as fibroid tumors to bleed out a bigger picture.
Take me back or I’ll die isn’t a threat that ever works.
On the plane, I watch my dad’s eyelids glisten like blintzes draped over blueberries. Sometimes I’m still that child, writing my mother letters with blank envelopes, splitting off into voices heard and imagined, hoping it’s all the poetry I recited as a young Russian pioneer with my hand at my forehead saluting the red flag—Always Ready. When the plane lands in Vienna, the place Jews like us tried to escape, I will not ask about my mother.
I will not ask for her until I speak English without an accent and grow breasts and fall in love for the first time and consider using my body for pleasure with another person, and that body will make me think of her, how it was given to me through her lust and labor pain. I will become unmute at last. I will ache at the source. And I’ll try to see her. I will give birth twice in lieu of going back again and again to my first home, believing she is there waiting for me, staring at the door with knitting in her lap.
XIX
After a few months on the outskirts of Vienna we arrived in Italy at a refugee camp of little unheated cabins at a summer soccer training ground, later moving to a rented flat with other Russians when no one would sponsor our visa to America. Long after all of our friends were granted asylum in Israel, Western Europe, or the US, we were the last ones left, not so much standing as slumping over in our lull. We were four-day-old fish. My Italian trip gave my growing thighs caked-on nightmares and a new wish to add to the bottle bobbing out in the open seas, never meeting shores, never docking at my mother’s port.
We were placed in a town called Lida di Ostia, which, as the name says, is a beauty by the sea, approximately an hour outside of Rome. My dad got a job pumping gas
at an Esso station and I was a squeegee-and-mop window girl on busy street corners. He explained that we desperately needed all the money I would make washing windows in order to get a head start in the States. I had just turned twelve, already the secondary breadwinner in our household.
Incredibly dirty men in cars would wave money at me. When I came over to take it, I would see that their trousers were undone, and they held their dicks in their hands. The really old guys were usually dressed in dapper khaki suits or linen button-downs and the dicks they waved like wrinkled flags back and forth were flaccid, all out of girl-harassment juice, but the desire to participate was still there. I would grab the money out of their free hand and run, setting up shop on a different corner.
Rome was a big city, and my eyes were peeled for corners where other kids weren’t hustling cars for window washings, or worse still, for sex. I did and didn’t know why some of the kids actually got into these men’s cars. I always only took the money and ran. Even though I hated washing car windows at red lights and running away with the money when I saw old dicks, my dad promised me ice cream at the end of the day if I made a certain amount of money. I was afraid to buy my own treats and felt guilty about skimming off the top when I did. The gelato in Italy is outstanding, a tangible marker of worth. I went back out on the street each time he fretted about bills and I made us the money. I gave it to him, pleased with any reward, a sign of belonging, of gratitude. I looked forward to the eventual exhale of going home with my dad at dusk. Maybe we would stroll the promenade and pick mussels for supper by the bearded rocks.
I was all alone in a strange country save for my dad and the friends he made. One of the single moms in his refugee circle had a son my age who was also barely parented, allowing us to sneak around the streets of Ostia at night and steal gas caps off as many cars as we could before our flour sacks became too heavy and we stashed them in abandoned boats on the shore. Walking back home we snickered and pointed at all of the parked cars lined up by the boardwalk with the fogged-up windows rocking gently like the sea on the horizon behind us.
The layers of danger we caused seemed laughable in our catcall fishbowl, either physically pursued by strangers or observing the casual vulgarity postered over our innocence, ignored. We were eventually caught in the act—finally seen and noticed as the unruly mutts with their leashes chewed off—forced to walk around town and restore every cap we could salvage to its proper function. To remember the source of the theft or keep twisting random covers around holes on vandalized cars until the right one found its home was somehow restorative.
In the summer of 1990, on our last full day in Italy, before we were to finally reach the promised land of cold, cold soda pop and hard living, my father’s boss invited only me over for dinner at his place. My father had let me go without hesitation. The boss said he had a travel bag to gift me so I could pack up the knickknacks and hand-me-downs we had acquired on Sundays at the local church, when the Catholic charity fed us lasagna and opened up white rooms with old angora sweaters in neat stacks, no-longer-starched button-down shirts, and knit dresses with tiny moth holes in them delicately arranged across plywood fold-out tables.
Every piece of clothing, which smelled like honeysuckle perfume spilled onto just-used old-ladies’ foam hair rollers, my father and I stuffed into paper bags and stored in the mirrored closet of our Ostia flat. We were hoarding these things to possibly resell them later. My father was also saving the clothes as future presents for my stepmother, who had succumbed to a heroin addiction, along with her younger sister. In the meantime, he was going to give out some of the loot to his fillers-in, his minor conquests in between the dry spells.
I was excited to get a new travel bag and I was hungry.
We ate dinner with his twenty-year-old daughter. Afterward she spread out on the floor in front of us, watching television on her stomach with her flat feet facing the ceiling like a perched butterfly. We sat behind her on a beige sofa with the plastic covers on. He draped his arm around my shoulder—no more than the length of an orange—with his enormous palm landing at my chest. He rubbed around the smooth surface and gave me a conciliatory pat on the raisin dot of a nipple and sat up.
He took me into his bedroom. I followed him in without protest. He laid me down on his carefully made-up bed. Everything in the room looked like vanilla pudding, save the simple Jesus on a cross hanging above the headboard. I stared at it like a speedometer that went flat right as the brakes failed. He began licking me and looking up for my reaction. There was something white on his lips. He tried to fit himself inside me but somehow couldn’t or wouldn’t. The hole in the wall was too tough to prod. He stood me up and tried to figure me out like a keyhole that wouldn’t accept the break-in. He could have just ripped off the doorjamb but seemed too proud to make that much of an effort or create a scuffle. It was a seduction with an unfortunate detour in his eyes. A preteen conjecture.
A Pentimento rape.
He was puzzled. He shrugged. He clutched my hand, and we left his bedroom. His daughter was still on the floor. The television sounded like home, like a mother ship, the chirping of the only song I still knew by heart when this new deafness, blindness, muteness came over me.
Not quite deflowered, but plucked and tossed away.
He walked me down to his cellar, not wanting to leave me upstairs with his oblivious daughter. I thought that this would be when he would kill me. He couldn’t fuck me, so he would kill me. He didn’t turn on the lights. He fished around the dusty, termite-chewed-up shelves for the blue canvas bag he had assured me was still mine when the search went on a tad too long, when I wouldn’t take my left hand off the rail by the entrance. He walked me back to the Esso station to meet my dad at the end of his shift, and the three of us posed for a farewell photo. My already emaciated dad was all oblivious skin on bone that day, still without dinner, light enough for liftoff.
× × × ×
When my great-granny Hope died I watched her in the coffin and imagined myself, or my mother, in it one day. A mother who won’t come home and is sleeping on a park bench drinking cologne in the snow is a dead mother walking.
I knew how to lie down, how to stand up, but I never kneeled then.
Mother, I am now down on my knees, Audre Lorde asking for me, To whom do I owe the woman I have become? when being taken from you is what marks the end of girlhood.
In the photo of us sitting on the floor at the airport in Rome, I am wearing a yellow sweat suit and straddling a baby-pink and sky-blue stuffy of a dog, while Dad is holding on to my light-gray stuffed animal with pleading puppy cartoon eyes and floppy ears. Dad is powering the grid of his dazzling teeth with a teenage boy’s smile. My bag is visible next to us in the center of it all. My other Italian toys poke out of the opened zipper.
I woke up a few times on the plane headed for Philadelphia. You could still smoke on planes then and the dirty gauze of spent Dunhills scratched my eyes open. I couldn’t stop staring at the bag that man gave me as my dad unpacked it later at the motel on our first day of my new air-conditioned America. With me, inside, was the country of the blockade, of Stalin, of unmarked graves, mass graves, scattered ashes, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, pressed flowers, ghost cipher mothers who needed to hear my secrets.
I think I woke up in Spanish class years later when we were learning the word molestar and I realized the teacher had been calling on me over and over. She wanted to know where I had gone. I had been in that cellar to be sure. In the cellar again, with that blue bag, which is still at my father’s house. I think I woke up in the middle of reading my Cookie Mueller book in which she said that her rapist sucked at the crime but gave her a musical jewelry box with a twirling pink ballerina inside before she escaped onto the streets of San Francisco. “It wasn’t even done well,” she remembers. Alerting the hippies she ran to on Haight about her distress, they fed the guy a massive dose of acid and claimed his gun as vengeance. No such luck for me, a souvenir forged without a res
cue squad.
Nearly being killed, nearly being raped, is like constantly smelling the rotting food you can’t find in your fridge every time you open the door to get something new to eat. Your appetites have been trashed.
The women in my family always planned to eat onions on the nights they wouldn’t be kissing men. The odor too repellant, unfeminine. But some nights, Granny and Mom would just shrug it off, cutting up whole bulbs for their herring, cry-laughing and rinsing knives under cold water to lessen the sting.
Traveling alone as a woman can still get you raped and killed. Traveling a few yards to a nearby field, even with a friend, or sister, or cousin in tow just so you can take a shit can get you raped and hanged. Skinned to drip-dry like a rabbit.
Hordes of writers dream of going to Italy in order to find themselves, find their new voice. And because, up until very recently, women couldn’t travel alone at all, this may be a worthy pursuit if you can afford it. Supervised travel used to be done in order to become cultured and more interesting to your future husband (sadly, matrimony is where most of the protagonists of modern travel writing eventually end up anyway) and had to be done quickly before your body shriveled up. Before you were to give birth to more kids than you wanted, or knew to want, and die somewhere between one of your children’s first days and weddings.
Dorothy Richardson, my patron saint of women on the hunt for adventure—an elliptical purpose constructed by going above the nerve—arrived in New York City alone to live in shabby little rooms and moved around constantly to afford her next meal. She had to be quite a bit terrified. Writing hunger and loneliness. Recording every meal with waning ink and patience, her wet hem never really drying from obsessively searching the streets for work, then stoking a small fire and making a record of that hem for me before slipping into cold sheets for the night.
Mother Winter Page 6