by Lara Vapnyar
My grandfather liked to read Soviet newspapers—thin, rustling, and smelling strongly of fresh print, the smell that my grandmother hated more than any other smell.
My grandmother liked to read novels—with yellowed pages, worn-out spines, and occasional illustrations.
As for me, I refused to read. First of all, I didn’t know how. I could do math on a fourth-grade level, but I couldn’t put letters and sounds together. My grandmother tried to teach me, but I resisted her efforts. My mother had been a voracious reader in Sevastopol, but now she kept saying that stories about love or death were unbearable, and all the books that ignored these two subjects weren’t worth reading. I didn’t fully understand what she meant, but it seemed like an admirable sentiment. I could kill time playing with my toys, but eventually I would find myself curled up on the rug in the middle of the room, wanting my mother.
The only thing that made that time more or less tolerable were the days when somebody came to take me away for an hour or two. My mother’s friend Rita would take me to play with her boys, Sasha, who was my age, and Misha, who was older. Rita’s husband (formerly a heavily drinking artist, now a full-time alcoholic) was always sleeping on the couch, his head hanging off the edge, his mouth agape, his snores like a mad dog’s gnarls. “God help you if you wake him up!” Rita said, and we took her words very seriously. Sasha and Misha kept kicking and punching and biting each other, grimacing in pain, but not making a sound. And I sat on the floor cheering them on in a low whisper. “Good for you, Misha . . . Sasha, now bite him back!”
And there were rare weekends when Uncle Grisha came to take me for a walk. He would have to sit in our kitchen first, eating reheated soup, wincing at my grandmother’s sticky hugs and frowning at my grandfather’s nagging. “I already have a job, Dad. I’m a photographer. Yes, it’s a real job! No, Dad, I don’t want you to speak to your veteran buddies on my behalf. I don’t care how high they are in the Communist Party!” I could see that Grisha was as eager to leave the apartment as I was.
He usually took me to Kuskovo Park. The park itself was leafy and sprawling and seemingly endless, with the woods, and the lake, and beautiful mansions, and even a small amusement park. Grisha explained to me that before the revolution, this entire territory used to belong to Count Sheremetev and nobody was allowed in except for his family and his servants.
“But now everybody is allowed in!” I said with the due eagerness of a Soviet child.
“Yes,” Grisha said under his breath, “and everybody can shit all over the place.”
He did say stuff like that often, and sometimes he even made jokes about communism, or Brezhnev or even Lenin, making it seem as if he didn’t believe that the Soviet Union was the best country in the world. His attitude confused me, but I enjoyed our outings too much to think about it.
In October, a spot opened in the Ministry of Education, and Rita, who used to work with my mother and now held her former position, begged her bosses to give it to my mother. Every day my mother would put on a black dress and black shoes and leave for work. I once asked her what her work was, and she said: “To stare at some papers and shuffle them around.”
It took her two years to start wearing gray and brown—I don’t remember any other colors in her wardrobe—and about the same amount of time to resume working on her books.
My mother came home from work around seven, and at a quarter of six I would be waiting for her at the door. Every time, I was hoping that the woman who walked through the door would be my old mother from our Sevastopol time, dark-haired and smiling, and happy to see me. Seeing my mother the way she looked now, gray-haired and zombie-like, came as a shock. I would still rush to hug her, but those hugs brought me little joy, worse than that—they frightened me. She still felt like my mother, with her familiar smell and familiar texture—soft and pliable in the same places as before, bony and scratchy in others. But she didn’t react to me the way my mother used to react, or the way any mother would. Not just her facial expression but even her hugs were devoid of warmth. This upset me so much that I felt like biting or punching her, but instead I ran away and cried.
There were pills to alleviate the sadness, and my grandmother and Uncle Grisha kept begging my mother to take them. She vehemently refused. She said that doing something to ease the pain would be the act of betrayal. She didn’t want to betray Daniil! she screamed. She didn’t want to feel nothing! She didn’t want to numb down her love for him. Danya might have died, but her love for him hadn’t!
Many years later, in fact just a few months before my mother died, she told me that the thing that tortured her the most back then was the intense sexual desire she still felt for my father. He was dead. Wanting him, dreaming about him, imagining all those things he would do to her, felt like the ultimate violation. I told her that I found it perfectly natural to want somebody who had died. If the death of a person doesn’t make longing for him any less, why should it diminish sexual desire?
But still her confession made me cringe. I found it especially embarrassing that I couldn’t help but compare her experience to mine, when B. had told me that we had to break it off. What I felt was a proverbial heartache—sharp pain in the left side of my chest—intensified by all these stubborn little urges: to say his name out loud, to touch his hand if even for a second, to feel him breathe down my neck, to have him inside me.
I didn’t share this with my mother. First of all, this was her time, she was the one who was dying, she was the star of the show. I was a supporting character, a sidekick. Other reasons were that I found it embarrassing to compare the loss of a husband to the end of an affair, and humiliating to admit to wanting a man who had left me of his own volition.
Unlike my mother, I didn’t have the strength to refuse the pills. I couldn’t handle the pain, I didn’t care if I betrayed our love or not. Perhaps this was precisely what I wanted, to betray our love, to make it die. Or perhaps I simply didn’t believe that it was over with B. and hoped that one day some miracle would happen, the space would curve, the reality would bend, the impossible would become possible, and he would come back to me. Perhaps my goal was to preserve myself until that happened.
The first year in Moscow, I didn’t miss my father at all. I was used to his absences, and his being dead didn’t differ that much from his being away. When I thought of him at all, I imagined him being far away, a tiniest speck on one of those tiny ships that crossed the horizon line and disappeared from view, but not altogether. Even though I couldn’t see them, they were still there, as my father had explained to me, out there, somewhere, or just There.
With my mother it was the opposite. She was right here, and yet she wasn’t. My entire life up to this point had been filled with her presence, and I couldn’t function without her. I would make up prayers to make her come back to me. It was my mother who had taught me how to pray. My father, like most Soviet scientists, was an atheist, but my mother said that she was agnostic. She explained that agnostics didn’t believe in Anything Specific, but they believed in Something, because it was too scary not to. She said that by saying the prayer, we let Something know that we believed in it so that it wouldn’t get mad at us. We would make up our own prayers that resembled nursery rhymes and included silly rituals like biting on our little fingers. “Water, air, metal, wood. [Bite.] We be happy, we be good.”
Now I had to make up my own lonely prayers. My bed was pushed against the bookcase, and I made a habit of touching the book spines before I went to sleep, and naming the animals on the covers of the books that stood on the level of my bed. “Bunny, mouse, doggy, cat. Make my mommy love me back.” I would end my prayer by pressing my face to the spine of the last book and licking it from top to bottom.
And guess what? My prayer worked.
Exactly nine months after we arrived in Moscow, I developed a cough accompanied by occasional fever that wouldn’t go away. My grandmother tried to cure me with chicken soup and raspberry jam, but none of that was hel
ping. One day my fever rose to 104, and my grandmother insisted that my mother stay home and call a doctor. I remember that doctor as a monstrously tall woman with huge hands as hard as wooden boards. She tapped and poked and squeezed various parts of my body with those hands, hurting me, making me cry. And then she spoke to my mother, making each sentence land like a hard slap.
“The child has pneumonia!” she said.
“And it’s very far gone!” she said.
“What kind of a mother are you?” she asked.
They took me to a hospital, and my mother never left my side there. She kept begging my forgiveness and promising that she would never ever leave me again. I was too sick to understand her words, but I understood that she had returned to me from that strange place she had inhabited for months, and that she was with me now, possibly more with me than she ever was before.
FOUR
One evening about ten years into our marriage, I found myself screaming at Len that I had had a very happy childhood.
Like most of our screaming fights, this one started with a pretty innocent dinner conversation. The kids were outside with their friends, my mother was in her apartment downstairs, on the phone with Uncle Grisha. Len came home after work, and I rushed to greet him as he was changing his shoes in the hallway He smiled at me, and as I hugged him, enjoying his familiar warmth, I thought maybe my marriage wasn’t that deficient after all. Maybe this was everything that marriage was supposed to be—longing for your husband to come home, feeling happy when he opened the door, feeding him, providing him with comfort after a busy day.
I put Len’s dinner on the table and sat down across from him with a fresh issue of the Magazine, hoping to come up with a topic for conversation. I wasn’t eating, myself, I had just had dinner with the kids—we rarely had dinner as a family, because Len never came home from work before eight. So here we were, I leafing through the magazine while throwing occasional glances at Len; Len silently working on his salmon with steamed broccoli, his long nose moving along with his mouth, his blue eyes trained on his plate, his large forehead shiny in the light of the overhead Ikea lamp. I stumbled on a cartoon I found funny. A young woman was complaining to her parents that they ruined her chance at becoming a writer by giving her a happy childhood. I showed the cartoon to Len and said: “I had a happy childhood too, but it didn’t stop me from becoming a writer!” He looked at me as if I were insane, then made a visible effort to get his expression back to neutral.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said and went back to his food.
I could’ve gone back to my magazine too, that would’ve been the smart thing to do to ensure marital peace or at least the appearance of it, but I either caught or imagined sarcastic notes in his “nothing,” which annoyed me so much that I continued to insist.
“Fine,” Len finally said. “You couldn’t seriously mean that you had a happy childhood, could you?”
I asked him why I couldn’t. He said that I knew why. I said that I didn’t. I insisted that despite losing my father I had had a very happy childhood.
He swallowed the last unappetizing bit of broccoli, put his fork down, and said in a straining-to-be-calm voice: “No, you didn’t!”
“Why not?” I asked, my voice quivering with anger.
“Because your mother is a monster.”
I threw my magazine at him and screamed that this wasn’t true.
He stood up, pushing his chair away so hard that it fell, and screamed back: “Your mother is crazy. She’s treated you like a guinea pig her whole life! She ruined you! Just look at you! She is a witch, a lunatic! And so are you!”
Note to a reader who knows what I’m talking about. Why is it that fighting partners so often attack each other’s parents? Is this blind groping for the most painful spot? Or a focused attempt to destroy the person starting with her origins, with something that made her who she is? And don’t you think that I was a blameless victim. I once called Len’s parents “vile brainless pigs.”
Usually, when your spouse tells you that your parent is a lunatic who fucked you up, it is hard to refute his point, because you don’t have any concrete evidence to prove the opposite. But I had the evidence. I had the actual documents to prove that I had been a happy child. My school essays, the letters and photographs in the blue plastic box on the bottom of the linen drawer in our bedroom. I ran upstairs to fetch the box, but when I got back, Len was already heading out of the kitchen. “No, wait,” I screamed. “You have to see these.” Len wouldn’t. I had to chase him up and down the three floors of our Staten Island house—tall and narrow like a pencil case, skipping and slipping, scraping my knees against the rough wood of the stairs. With the box pressed to my chest, screaming: “Just look at one letter, one!”
I kept chasing him, until he fled down to the garage and shut the door in my face.
Note to an astute reader thinking that my behavior actually confirmed Len’s assessment of my mental state. Like you’ve never done anything crazy in the middle of a vicious fight!
I ended up going back to the bedroom and looking through the contents of the box on my own, hunched on top of our marital bed, trying to hold my tears so my face wouldn’t look all blotchy and puffed-up by the time the kids came inside to get ready for bed.
On top of the pile were four green copybooks filled with my school essays, most of which happened to be about my mother. Every time the school would assign an essay on one or another aspect of Soviet people’s heroism, I would naturally write about my mother, because she wasn’t just my role model, she was my hero of heroes. Take this one, for example. “Heroism of Soviet Children during WWII.”
“When the war started, my mother was five. My grandfather went to war, and my grandmother took my mother and her younger brother (my uncle Grisha) away from Moscow to a village in the mountains. On the way there, Nazis dropped bombs right on top of their train. My five-year-old mother covered her baby brother with her body and saved his life. Because of Soviet children like my mother we defeated Hitler.”
Or this one, “Soviet Ideals in Everyday Life.”
“One day, when my mother was twelve, my grandfather decided to punish my uncle Grisha. (He was eight and belligerent.) My grandfather pulled the leather belt out of his pants and started hitting Uncle Grisha on his back and butt. My mother ran into the room and screamed: ‘Soviet people don’t hit their children!’ My grandfather stopped.”
Note to a politically astute reader. This strikes you as a cult of personality, right? Well, what did you expect? I didn’t grow up in a totalitarian society for nothing.
I realized that I had never really reread my school essays until now, and what struck me about them was how similar they were to the essays my kids were writing in their American public school. Even though the political system in the United States isn’t totalitarian, the teachers seem to praise the same simple language, the same unwavering logic of the structure, the same tendency to hammer the main point, and the same ideological steadfastness.
“The US is the land of opportunities,” they would go. “My grandmother is a great example. When she came to the US, she was a poor clueless immigrant. Then she saw an opportunity . . .”
Or, “Before feminism, women used to be powerless, but when my grandmother got a job at the Ministry of Education, she could make important decisions. This is an example of great progress for feminism.”
But it wasn’t the dogmatism that bothered me about my kids’ essays; it was the fact that they’d always choose my mother as the example. My mother, and not me, their mother.
This wasn’t fair! My mother had already had her share of essays written about her. I wrote them. My jealousy suggested that perhaps the essays weren’t the greatest proof of the normalcy of my upbringing, so I hurried to tuck them away behind the photographs and other stuff.
But there were also letters. Letters and postcards to my grandmother filled with my hurried childish handwriting, bursting with happin
ess.
Dear Gran,
You are probably wondering how our journey went. It was amazing! [See Len, see?]The train compartment was pretty clean—unlike the last time—haha! We shared it with two drunk men. They were very nice though. They gave us two peaches and they dropped two more on the floor, so we got those too.
How are my dear hamsters?
Love, K.
I used to send letters to my grandmother from the trips my mother and I took every summer. We couldn’t afford a real vacation, but my mother got invited to speak at teachers’ seminars all over the country. They paid very well and covered all our travel expenses, except for my train ticket. One summer the seminar would be in Latvia, another summer in Belarus, or Georgia, or Ukraine, or Moldova.
I wrote to my grandmother not because I missed her—I didn’t—and not because I thought she’d enjoy my letters—I knew she wouldn’t care—but because I wanted to revive and relive all the wonderful moments of our trips through writing and because the act of writing made me feel very good about myself.
Dear Gran,
Today we arrived in Brest. The seminar ladies were waiting for us at the station. With flowers! Roses! Apparently they think that we are super important. [I use “we” throughout. “We” are important. Not just my mother, but my mother and I together.]
Please, say hello to my dear hamsters.
Love, K.
See, Len, see? See how happy I was?
And in the winter months, when there were no teachers’ seminars, the fun continued. My mother took me everywhere with her, even to all kinds of grown-up places, to see serious plays, and operas, and ballets. She could’ve taken anybody: my grandmother, Grisha, Rita, but she picked me. Because I was unusually smart and mature for my age. Or at least that was what I thought when I was a child. Later I came up with another, less flattering, explanation. All of these other people had their own lives, their own partners, their own interests, and I was the only one truly eager to accompany my mother everywhere, listen to her, get excited by whatever excited her.