by Lara Vapnyar
Finding the first moment when the love was gone is harder. There was emigration. Selling the apartment. Getting rid of our things. Saying our goodbyes. The going-away party. Seeing Sasha drunk for the first time. He was crying and saying that he and Yulia were getting married soon, and that he didn’t want to get married, that he was sick of his life, that he would’ve given anything to be going somewhere too. His mother, Rita, gave my mother a pack of tea with the words: “Here, so you could have tea, if things get really bad.”
Then there was the long flight over the Atlantic. My first time on a plane. I remember three things.
The clouds looking like the dust gathered in the bag of a vacuum cleaner.
Imitation crabmeat for lunch.
And the scary sound the toilet flush made.
Then there was immigration. Seeing Uncle Grisha for the first time in years—shit, he looked so bad! Exploring the new place. The hot rush of strangeness. Len and I were beside ourselves with excitement, and it made me mad that my mother refused to share it.
Uncle Grisha had found a tiny one-bedroom for us, in a cheap corner of Brooklyn, crowded with both Orthodox Jews and Haitians. Len and I got the bedroom with no windows and a huge crack in the wall, and my mother settled on the sofa in the living room separated from the rest of the apartment by a greasy yellow curtain. She spent her first weeks in the US sitting on that sofa, drinking Rita’s tea and holding one of our Russian books in her lap, but not reading it. I was annoyed with her. I thought she was just stubborn in her refusal to go out and admire all things American, like skyscrapers, hot dogs, and free plastic bags.
It was only years later that my mother told me how scared and lost she felt then, how thoroughly useless. She said: “Remember how we couldn’t decide if we should bring our down pillow with us?” I remembered. Some people had told us to leave it, but others had insisted that they didn’t have good down pillows in the US and they were worth their weight in gold. Eventually, we decided to ship it. We were shipping tons of books anyway. All the Russian classics, all the math textbooks. Spent a fortune on postage. The pillow arrived safely, but it turned out to be too big for the American pillowcases, and anyway, it was lumpy and fat and uncomfortable. We stuffed it in the back of our closet in Brooklyn and it never saw the light of day again. “I felt like that pillow,” my mother said.
During those first weeks in New York, Len and I went exploring the city every chance we got. We’d take the Q train into Manhattan and exit at a different stop each time. This way, we thought, we would see the city at random, not as tourists but as explorers. It was such a thrill to go up the subway steps without knowing what we would see at the top, whether it would be a bunch of skyscrapers, a park, a Korean deli, or a fancy restaurant. We walked the streets hand in hand, choosing our direction depending on traffic lights. When the light was green, we walked forward; when the light was red, we turned. Sometimes we had to run across the street, and we ran, laughing, squeezing between people, jumping over puddles.
I described all that in my letters to Sasha and Yulia, especially the joy Len and I felt, the joy of having “made it,” of belonging to this city that we had known only in movies.
Was our love still there then? I can’t tell. The intensity of the first weeks in the US was too overwhelming to keep track of love. To keep track of anything, really.
Both Len and I felt buoyant with enthusiasm about our job prospects. Well, in Len’s case our enthusiasm was perfectly justified. He was a gifted computer programmer, and computer programmers were in high demand. Len found a great job within three weeks. Bought a New York Times, circled ads in the help wanted section, sent out his résumé, had a couple of interviews, and got a job. Just like that. His salary was $38,000. Everybody said that the highest starting salary for a computer programmer was $35,000. Len got $38,000! He could barely speak English!
I was sure I would find a great, exciting job within weeks too. I was smart, I thought. I was a quick learner, I had an open mind, I didn’t mind hard work. And my English was much better than Len’s. I had studied it in college, and here in Brooklyn I had been supplementing it using my own system. Uncle Grisha had brought us his old VCR and a huge box full of VCR tapes with Hollywood movies he had recorded from TV. Wall Street. Pretty Woman. Working Girl. Once Upon a Time in America. I’d watched each of these movies hundreds of times, pausing and rewinding every time I couldn’t understand a line of dialogue, until I finally got every word.
So strong was my willed optimism that it held against all odds for all of two months. Even as all of my job applications went unanswered, even as I was running out of ads to respond to, I kept reading and circling, reading and circling, steadily shedding my vanity and applying for less and less exciting jobs. “Oh, no,” a woman said to me at one place, where I’d applied to be a receptionist. “We need somebody who speaks English.”
This came as a shock. I had been very proud of my English, but apparently it wasn’t good enough for working with people, or with animals, for that matter, as I found out after being rejected as a dog walker. And I’d applied to be a language arts teacher! I imagined how people had chuckled when they read my résumé, when they looked at the xeroxed table of contents from the obscure Russian magazine I always attached.
I couldn’t bear to go to Manhattan anymore. I couldn’t even bring myself to write to Sasha and Yulia anymore. I sent them a short postcard congratulating them on their wedding, but other than that I had nothing to say.
“She needs to learn a useful profession!” Grisha’s wife, Bella, said. “That’s what Americans do.”
They would invite us to dinner and speak of themselves as “Americans,” as opposed to immigrants who remained hopelessly Russian, including my mother and me. Bella even coined a term for people like us—“Ruswine.” As in, “Look at the Ruswine hunting for furniture in the garbage.”
“Why don’t you learn computer programming?” Len asked. He promised to help me study, so we wouldn’t need to pay for classes. This was the nineties, the time of the huge technological bubble. “Even the shittiest programmers are finding work,” Len said.
I noticed that Len had changed dramatically in the weeks since he’d found a job. He used to be shy, skinny, and shaggy-haired. Now he was square and trim, with a new confidence shining from his blue eyes the way synthetic glow shone from his new Century 21 suits. He was twenty-four, but he looked almost forty.
I thought that the old shaggy-haired Len would’ve understood that I didn’t want to be the shittiest programmer or the shittiest anything. He would’ve urged me to find something where I could shine, just like he did.
Then I noticed another change. The old Len used to love my mother. He felt more respect and affection for her than he did toward his own parents. The new Len wouldn’t conceal how annoyed he was by my mother’s mere presence, let alone the fact that she lived with us. He would engage in petty bickering with her that frightened and appalled me.
“Nina, why are you putting bologna in the freezer?” he would ask.
“It was starting to rot.”
“Nina, if something is starting to rot, you have to fry it up, not put it into the freezer!”
Note to a practical reader. Try to determine the correct course of action with that rotten bologna. Keep in mind that we were recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union and throwing bad food into the garbage was out of the question.
My mother wouldn’t argue with Len, but she would get back at him in some sort of sneaky way. For example, she liked to wait for Len to walk into the bathroom with the fresh issue of the New York Times, so she could tiptoe up to the light switch in the hall and turn the light off as if by accident. She knew that Len found it intensely embarrassing to talk to people while he was on the toilet. So it was pure torture for him to have to yell: “Hey, somebody! Anybody! Please turn the light back on!”
I think it was my mother’s petty war with Len that helped lift her spirits. I would often overhear her ta
lking to Uncle Grisha on the phone, laughing and boasting of her small victories. I remembered how after my father died, she would draw power from her meanness, and perhaps this was exactly what was happening now. Her mood was certainly better; she started to leave the house more, go and explore New York on her own, and one day she put her best textbooks into a plastic bag and went to the Jewish Immigrant Agency to ask them to help her find a job. The women at the agency weren’t impressed by the textbooks or by the fact that my mother had been a university professor. “Perhaps I could tutor Russian kids in math?” my mother suggested. The women at the agency chuckled and explained that you needed to know the ins and outs of the American school curriculum for that. “How about cleaning houses?” one woman asked. “Or perhaps you have experience caring for the sick and elderly?” suggested another. “Yes! Yes, I have!” my mother said, feeling darkly fortunate that my grandmother’s long illness provided her with a marketable skill.
Her first patient was a sixty-five-year-old widower with Parkinson’s. His name was Elijah Ross. My mother liked him right away. So intelligent, so well-read, she would gush at home. He used to be an editor at the Most Important Literary Magazine, and yet he was so modest, so grateful for every little thing she did for him.
My mother’s schedule was Tuesday through Saturday. She would get up every morning at seven, have a quick breakfast, and rush to the subway so she would be at Elijah’s Upper West Side apartment by nine. More often than not, she would arrive too early, and then she would exit the subway a couple of stops earlier and take a little walk to Elijah’s place, using a different route each time. She said that the best thing about finding a job was that it made her days structured again.
Bonus problem. Considering that Elijah’s apartment was on the corner of Ninety-First Street and Amsterdam Avenue, and my mother got off the subway on Seventy-Second and Central Park West, calculate how many different routes she could use along that neat grid of NYC streets.
“Even your mother found a job!” Bella said to me. “And you’re still wallowing in your specialness?”
I don’t think Bella expected that her words would hurt me that much. But they did. They made me understand the meaning of self-loathing. You hate and despise somebody so much that you physically can’t stand her presence, but you can’t do anything to escape her presence, because that person is you.
I asked Len to teach me computer programming the next day.
Len bought several used C++ textbooks and made a plan of study. I was to read a certain number of pages a day and do several exercises. At the end of the day, Len would check my progress and point out my weak areas so I could study them more before the next day’s assignment.
My days became structured too. As did my evenings. One of those evenings, I was sitting in our bed, leaning against the wall—the bed didn’t have a headboard—with the C++ for Beginners propped against my belly. My mother was snoring on her sofa bed behind the curtain. Len was sitting with his back to me at our makeshift desk, playing Tetris. As far as I could see he was doing well. I wasn’t. I was rereading the chapter that I had failed to understand earlier that day, and I still didn’t understand it. Every couple of pages I would be seized by an urge to masturbate, out of sheer boredom rather than anything else. I could easily accomplish that without Len noticing, but I felt too lazy to do that. I kept dozing off, floating away from reality, until I was woken up by the victorious Tetris beeps. Then I went back to C++ and the circle repeated itself. I managed to maintain that routine for a couple of weeks. Then I started to cheat.
Elijah gave my mother a whole pile of old issues of the Magazine so she could improve her English. She would spend most of her evenings bent over our kitchen table. There was a magazine issue spread in front of her, and the huge English-Russian dictionary we had brought from Moscow, and a little notepad she used for writing down words she didn’t know. Every word had a numerical value from one to three. One was assigned to words that appeared in the text only once, two to words that appeared several times, and three to words that appeared all the time. At the end of each session, she would memorize all the three words, some two words, and ignore unimportant one words altogether.
Note to a reader who wants to learn a foreign language. This method will do wonders for your reading skills. But only if you’re naturally disciplined! If not, forget about it.
I started taking long breaks from studying computer programming to read the Magazine too, telling myself that I did it to improve my English so I could have better job prospects as a computer programmer. I admired my mother’s system, but I didn’t have the patience to follow it myself, so I would submerge myself in the text, skipping words that I didn’t know, trying to either guess or imagine whatever I couldn’t understand. This method didn’t work for nonfiction essays, but I found that I could read short stories with growing ease. I hadn’t read any fiction since we left Russia, and I was starved for stories.
There was one author that I especially liked, she would appear in the magazine again and again. I was hooked when I came to the following passage:
Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors. . . . What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manage wives.
The story took place in Canada decades ago, and yet I recognized Len right away, down to the image of his “youthful neck” sticking awkwardly from his discounted Kenneth Cole shirt. This writer, Alice Munro, captured him perfectly without ever meeting him. What was more, she captured how I saw him. She knew exactly how I felt. I wasn’t alone in feeling that. I wasn’t alone, period. I experienced a rush of overwhelming, almost embarrassing, gratitude.
“Do you like Alice Munro?” my mother asked when she caught me reading her story. “Her writing is too difficult for me, but Elijah likes her. He says she’s the greatest living writer. He worked with her, you know.”
My mother was definitely talking about Elijah too much. It was like she couldn’t help but bring him up again and again, which could be a sign of what exactly? Attraction? Infatuation? Still, I didn’t ponder their relationship much, until my mother came to me with a strange request.
She wanted me to translate my Reading World story for Elijah.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s about me,” she said, blushing. “I want him to know me.”
I found it flattering that my mother thought it was possible to get to know her through my story, but I doubted that I would be able to translate it well enough. “Something rough will do,” my mother said. I said I’d try. That very night, I took out the copy of the Reading World and our enormous Russian-English dictionary and set to work, which turned out to be much more challenging than I’d expected. Some words didn’t have an English equivalent; others had too many and my grasp of the English wasn’t strong enough to choose the right one, and even when I managed to come up with a passable translation of one or another sentence, it would still lack something vital, something more important than the correct meaning. Those Tetris beeps were infuriating! I asked Len to lower the volume and he turned and asked what I was doing. “I’m translating my story,” I said. He scoffed and turned back to the screen. He must have thought that self-translating was yet another expression of my vanity.
The next day, I decided to try something else. I abandoned my Russian story and started writing a new one, in English, from scratch. This one was about us: our trips to teachers’ seminars, how we’d lived in empty schoolhouses, slept on piled-up mats, brushed teeth in school bathrooms, boiled eggs with the help of an immersion heater. Writing in English turned out to be easier, less constrictive, and much more thrilling than translating. It didn’t require torturous attempts to find the single right word. The English words
that I knew effortlessly rushed to my mind, and I found that I rarely needed the words that I didn’t know. And if I ever got scared or overwhelmed by the task of writing in a foreign language, I would tell myself that this wasn’t a short story, this was more like a long sketch about my mother. I finished in two weeks, typed it up on Len’s computer, printed out the pages, and gave them to my mother. “It’s not the same story,” I said, “but it’s still about you.” She took our English-Russian dictionary, which was even thicker than the Russian-English one, and went to her sofa to read it. “I didn’t understand all of it,” she said the next morning, “but what I did understand I liked.” It didn’t occur to me to show the story to Len.
A week later, my mother told me that Elijah wanted to see me. We both assumed that he wanted me to clarify something about the story. On Saturday, my mother and I took a long subway ride to the Upper West Side together, and exited onto the leafy street neatly framed with tall dignified buildings. “It will be like entering a Woody Allen film,” my mother told me in the elevator, “you’ll see,” and once we entered I saw what she meant. We had watched a couple of Woody Allen movies on TV, and even though my mother couldn’t understand what the characters were saying (they spoke way too fast even for me), she was quite taken with the interiors. Elijah’s apartment looked exactly like the one in Hannah and Her Sisters, with its high ceilings, and large windows, and endless bookshelves, and a grand piano in the middle. Later, after I’d visited a lot of similarly furnished apartments on the Upper West Side, I realized that it was quite typical, but back then I decided that Elijah must be a huge fan of Woody Allen to build a replica of his movie set.