Found a record which could be of interest to you—
Shalmieva Elena Viktorovna
born 26 Jan 1958
St Petersburg, Bronnitskaya St, house 22, apt 11
Phone +7 812 3161702
The data might be several years old, but still worth a try.
It was a comfort to see our old address attached to her name, from which she was unceremoniously kicked out for pouring vodka on the hearth rather than tending its flames, in every way. The data was indeed too old to be useful, a fading photo with not enough fixer after development.
× × × ×
It is rumored that Sappho had only one child, a daughter who was also dark like her. Somewhere among us there may be Sappho descendants but they have to invent her face, her clothes, her hair, and the lines of her body based on composites of the dress fashion of the times or how she was described centuries later by male poets and scholars who admired her but never met her.
The recently discovered papyrus of Sappho fragments have finally given us more to analyze, assemble, and catalog, but we will always want more fossils. The incomplete has a lifelong contract with our attention span, reminding us of our penchant for endings that create a resolution, our need for excavation of beginnings, our insistence on linearity, our demand for clues of orderliness.
Sappho’s poems were once shredded and used as stuffing in mummified royal crocodile carcasses. When found, every bit was pored over with magnifying glasses. Scholars, classicists, archivists, and translators standing around photographs of the ruined text piecing together the elusive message of the woman described as a dark little sparrow. No genuine picture or painting exists of the corporeal Sappho.
The Christians burned her books, proclaiming her a slut. Everything we know about Sappho’s familial history or sex life is feminist academic gossip.
Say the word lyre out loud.
Anne Carson chose to translate the gaps in her version of Sappho by using brackets. There was a clawlike space to point to the loss, to excite the reader into the potent and excruciating task of wagering bets, of hallucinating a breathing image within a ripped hole.
Bitter words of a love that cannot be mirrored back, a remote love, a dangerously potent love, direct and unwavering in the blank, erased stanzas. A lone line has to signify so much more than its original intention, of a larger lyric, the twenty letters left behind infused and made orgasmic with a meaning that can never be understood.
There can be no periods at the end of Sappho translations because she is forever unfinished business to us
XXIV
I would book the trip during the famous white nights in June, when the bridges part over the canals and it is dusk at four in the morning, the city actually not being able to sleep so people become possessed; they make out on every corner and leave their spouses for anyone who winks at them. I wanted my three-note, sleepy, leveled and depressed but loyal boyfriend to wake up in Russia and never pass out on me again.
The landscape ahead of us: Russia is a blacked-out mother, lifted robe. Three channels in black and white, two of them playing the same thing when the news broadcast is on, a knob that keeps coming off. A motherland unlost, but not found.
Before the glory of the white nights never materialized, because I was mostly paralyzed with dread and feelings of incompetence for not knowing how to find my mother, we managed to board a flight to Moscow, with a connecting flight to St. Petersburg. What I didn’t remember from my childhood is that the international and local airports are two separate entities.
There was so much confusion over getting a car to take us to a different part of Moscow that we missed our connecting flight and were forced to sleep on separate beds, watching late-night Russian TV in a crappy motel after a dinner of chicken Kiev so greasy it squirted us in the eye when pressed into with a fork. I couldn’t figure out how to get a new chip for my flip phone and let the family friends who went to pick us up at the St. Petersburg airport know of our mishap.
We didn’t realize that there were two sets of friends trying to help us out. We spent days out of the now truncated week in Russia, cordially visiting with folks I have only seen a handful of times as a child, but who cleaned their homes and cooked for hours and bought us presents to celebrate our arrival. We were treated to many a potlatch. We toasted, and we ate. We barely spoke of my mother—a plumeless bird.
How do birds perch just so to grab their holly berries without getting stuck, without getting cut by those razor leaves?
× × × ×
Back in St. Petersburg the waiters and shopkeepers and museum workers mused: “That is a curious accent you have. Where were you born?”
“I was born here but left for America many years ago.”
“I don’t think you were born here. Where are you really from?” the lady at the checkout line says back. I buy some museum souvenirs and hang my head, a passing plague in her fair city.
For most of the time back in the town where I was born I tried to get up before noon and failed. I made myself wake up early to go to the American consulate to ask for advice on finding a relative who wasn’t listed in the phone book and was given a shrug.
I sat on the curb outside every official building in St. Petersburg that may have been relevant to my search and groped for tissues in my pocket as meek as a granny with a runny-nosed kid by her side before getting up and riding the metro to the Hermitage for relief. The museum fortified me temporarily until I resumed my wait in fetid rooms to eventually speak with a police chief in my mother’s old precinct who offered me a candy from his desk drawer after I offered him a sizable bribe. Still, no Elena.
The accidental spilling of salt is considered to be bad luck, so you must throw a few pinches over your shoulder to break the spell, to create the performance of control, to tip the scales of helplessness. Liquid salt has no way of being tossed aside.
I went to the city archives to ask after a recent death certificate or a wedding license that matched my mother’s name and was told to leave by the elderly secretary behind the glass partition. She looked at my American passport and murmured that “Gypsies can make any kind of fake document they wish nowadays with computers.” When I insisted that I had a blood relative who spent her whole life in this city and I came from far away to find her, she pointed to the security guard, who told me to lower my voice and exit without his help. I turned mute.
During a downpour, my boyfriend, who had long black curly hair and olive skin, ducked into a phone booth. An older gentleman knocked on the glass and gestured for him to get out, as though he had to use the pay phone in a great hurry. As my boyfriend scrambled to join me under a restaurant awning, I heard the man mumble: “That’s right, black ass, step aside.”
I did manage to visit our old haunts in search of you. The woman who lived in my granny’s apartment had cancer. We spoke of God. She felt bad for not having more to say about where my family had moved to when Granny sold her the place. She confessed that she wasn’t going to call me at first but the letter I left on her door had such careful cursive and that moved her to action. It ended by saying, “Please help me look for my ma.” I did want to tell her that my hands weren’t steady enough and I just dictated it to my father’s friend, who indeed has perfect penmanship, but refused to unnecessarily disappoint her with the truth. My Russian letters are crude. But my instinct toward forgery is right on.
This woman told me that my granny also had breast cancer. She didn’t get out of bed the day the sale was made. Her second husband did all the talking. Granny likely died shortly after the sale, as she had stage four cancer and looked dejected. I took out the cross I wore for the first time in my life and planned to gift to my granny and we lowered our heads. I didn’t know how to pray.
× × × ×
“Look, it’s little Sonia. The girl from next door came over,” said the toothless woman to the man staring at his glass. The barren room had blown-out and charred sockets, black soot crawling up the walls
with hanging wires, and a table with a bottle on it. They shook their heads when I asked after my family. I couldn’t go inside, and no one had invited me to in the first place.
Walking away from the toothless couple I saw that if I leaned any further down to reach for you I would fall. But the falling was always the inevitable outcome of my looking for you in the first place. I landed right where I belonged, back in the place of not knowing, of Ma.
× × × ×
Sometimes on this trip, dissociating, I would pretend that instead of you being the missed and missing one, it was me who had to be mourned by you; there would be a story in a newspaper, our faces side by side, about me pitching a tent outside of your door, waiting until you came out and faced me, but I get suddenly struck by lightning instead:
The sizzle-in-the-pan sound lasted for hours while the torched girl moaned. The mother began vomiting two days later when the bubbles popped on the red-and-black tarp of what was skin. The mother asked why the body remained unmoved for days and was told it had only been fourteen minutes since the incident. She was told to sleep, and she slid in her daughter’s place and stared at the blighted canopy. She woke up and was informed it was the same day still. The authorities insist on cremating the burnt remains at once, for the child could not be made to look human for a casket. The mother took her daughter’s coal of an index finger to outline her own eyes; no mirror was provided. The girl used to be in and out of her, and now others can see her looking back as two black holes.
XXV
My boyfriend went out to explore my city by himself when I was too despondent to leave our little flat. He was a photographer, constantly snapping pictures of every event from his own point of view of an exotic world of Soviet-era leftovers, Lenin statues and young girls who lived in Stalinist buildings much like my granny’s flat. He didn’t take a picture of my granny’s apartment or the toothless couple next door. These were not monuments, or works of great art, or relics of the past. These things were still breathing, too hot to touch, even with a lens. He had an ability to hold you from a distance.
With only a few days left in St. Petersburg I decide there’s nothing left to do but to play hostess to my companion. I would take hot baths in the algae-green water after a sleepless night with a towel on my eyes to keep out the amorous light, mocking me, and attempt to move about as though walking in peanut butter.
During one of my restorative walks through the bedrooms and sitting rooms of the royals, whom some of my ancestors were indirectly responsible for killing off as soldiers in the Red Army, I overheard a tour guide tell a couple of Americans that the upholstered walls in the palace are a replica of the originals, which could not be salvaged after a fire. I was dismayed with this forgery because for most of my childhood I worshiped this elaborate silk wallpaper as something ancient and belonging to a decadent era of kings and queens.
I made a joke to the tour guide that they need to tell the kids who come through here that these are not original silks so that they don’t waste their imaginations on the wrong fantasy. She pointed to the elderly couple in front of her and scolded me for rudely interrupting their private tour.
When St. Petersburg was still called Leningrad, private was a dirty word, and I hadn’t adjusted to this new place with its new rules in the week I hid in museums on our native soil to think about you in the only way I have managed to find useful.
I found a room in the attic of the Hermitage where restorations were taking place. Everyone seemed to be away at lunch. A small canvas, a landscape full of yellows and browns, was in the process of getting its supposedly original colors back.
The window was open onto the square as the painting dried in the wind coming off the river.
What kind of data was collected about the state of the painting when it was still fresh? The restoration could only attempt to fix the piece up to a certain point, about the time one would begin to suspect the onset of an unacceptable kind of ruin. The larger, understood decay, had to be respected and drawn around. Once the new paint was applied, did the artist wait for it to dry enough to do violence to the uneven surface and generate new cracks for posterity?
× × × ×
Before we went home to New York, we had dinner with my father’s friends in St. Petersburg one last time. It had become apparent that I would not find my mother and the trip was a bust. I went down to the car to fetch a large sack with the fake Chanel purse, tuberose perfume, lacy black underwear, and other goodies I had stashed away for my mother. They appeared embarrassed because the intended never showed up to the altar and accepting these things would be like wearing a used wedding dress. To change the subject, they spoke of the Russian skinheads and nationalists who wouldn’t leave the Central Asians alone. They imported exotic fresh herbs and vegetables sold fairly, yet their produce stands were constantly looted. “Oh, the animals,” my dad’s friend said, glancing over at me protectively.
Before I left for Russia I had watched a video of an ethnic man from one of the former Soviet Republics being beaten almost to death. He looked like my father. They let him live long enough to make him watch his passport being burned. “Now you don’t exist,” a young boy with corn-silk hair in a buzz cut says, holding up the flaming photo.
My boyfriend began eating meat for the first time since childhood on that trip. Being vegetarian is quite difficult at a Russian table without starving and appearing rude. When we spoke a few years ago he told me that he still eats flesh to this day. That trip sealed his appetites.
XXVI
You used to be my fictional painter and my fictional painting. On the plane ride back to New York I accepted the recurring image of you with giant headphones hugging a glossy brown bob while you plugged and unplugged cords from a tangled wall of sound. Telephone dispatch operator on the night shift was the only real job that I remembered you had. I was beginning to arrange the details I previously ignored at will, a composition with the most potent of gaps, the chasm now echoed back to me.
Ma is a place of silence, a resting tone, a crater in between giving up and looking again.
Marcel Proust never reduced his dependence on his mother. As a child he religiously insisted on kissing her good night multiple times before finally dozing off, no matter the circumstance or her availability.
He wrote about ruined relationships through his fictional characters in drawn-out sentences that put others to sleep. He sabotaged his actual love affairs to avoid having to compare any intimates to the holy image he retained of his mother. He wrote for her and of her so breathlessly that to break up the kisses of each thought with periods would have corroded the unsettling wholeness that his mother provided for him. Proust lived happily within his nostalgia, where his lovers could never reach him.
I don’t want to admit that the lover I chose at a time I could barely read a map was lost to himself. A lover who was coarse and unforgiving. A lover who left his jacket, with the return ticket to America in the pocket, on a bus out to our terminal. That he curled up in a ball in the corner of the terminal when the airline tersely told him he would have to purchase a new ticket. Nothing surprised me about Russian scams at this point.
I don’t want to admit that after he screamed about how much he hated himself, refused to look at me, and told me that he deserved to be left at the airport, that I should run to catch my flight, I maxed out my credit card and bought him a new ticket.
I don’t want to admit that I didn’t even go to my old building, as planned, to make sure my mother wasn’t magically back there; to retrace the steps of my grocery errands, being sent to check for movie times at the theater next door, or seeing my first two pirated American films: Fletch and Midnight Cowboy, shown in our cellar on a tiny screen we paid five rubles to watch, or the newsstand where I fetched my mother her cigarettes and scanned the front page of Pravda, pretending I was an elegant grown woman with brown leather gloves, a periwinkle-blue scarf, and a smart green wool coat with a wide belt.
× × × ×
I don’t want to admit here that I didn’t find her—that I failed.
I don’t want to admit that as your epigram I would continue to roam free.
What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
I don’t want to admit that I wasn’t alone on this trip to Russia, as I secretly planned all along to be, before everyone talked me out of it, so someone I loved enough to bring with me watched me crap out in every way.
I came back with a suitcase full of excellent Russian linens—every part of me hollow save a vulgar smile to bully and kick away the urge to scratch my Soviet skin off and bury it, sit shiva for it, reenter society as teeth and gums only.
× × × ×
After a late shift at the shelter in East New York I was held up at gunpoint in my apartment building. It was my twenty-sixth birthday. My photographer boyfriend and my best friend, Kelly, were waiting for me at home, just two floors up, so we could have a quick weekday celebration with takeout. The man who tried to steal my purse had a mask on and I could see only his eyes. He looked sad and panicked and I stared hard back at him and screamed until Kelly opened the door and he ran away. Kelly suggested that my boyfriend pick me up at the train stop for a while and his eyes widen; he feels horrible but thinks I can take care of myself.
That night, in bed with my boyfriend, with whom I felt a certain kind of desperate passion—like a cheetah attacking a buffalo—amplified by him being monotone and withholding, I talk about my mother. About feeling like my body is in another country and my mind is stuck, flipping over like a broken tape deck. I feel him drifting away and he is passed out when I look up at his face. Soon enough he will break up with me, too young to settle down, needing more experience, not sure being attached is for him. I don’t blame him. And know I should have picked my girlfriend’s love over a guy.
Mother Winter Page 9