A Lotus Grows in the Mud (19 page)

“You have beautiful hair,” she tells me, staring at my now shoulder-length locks. “Like your name. Golden.”

Embarrassed, I run my hands through it and tell her, “Oh, it’s not looking its best right now. It needs a good wash.”

She jumps up like a child. “Please. I will wash for you.”

“Oh, no, no, that’s okay.”

“Please,” she says quietly, pressing her hand on mine. “I want. I used to wash my sister’s hair.”

So, there in her warm kitchen, with her son playing with his wooden blocks, she positions my head over her deep ceramic sink and washes my hair gently with shampoo that smells like Palmolive soap.

“Yes, my sister left. She is in New York. She is now model.”

I look up. “You could be a model too.”

She laughs. “No.” She pauses. “I will never see my sister again.”

“Why didn’t you defect with her?” I ask.

“My heart is in Russia,” she replies simply, her gaze steady.

I am beginning to understand. There is still something steeped in the walls of these old buildings that speaks of this nation’s great history, of its poetry and its art.

When Kristina has finished rinsing my hair, she turns on the oven, opens the oven door and leads me to a chair in front of it. She sits me down and pushes my head upside down. Without saying a word, she runs her hands through my hair, fluffing it dry, so tenderly. I feel like we’ve been friends for years. She must have loved her sister very much.

“Now, how beautiful,” she chirps, preening and fluffing the last few strands of my hair. “Now you will meet my friends.”

With her child on her shoulders, Kristina and I skip down the stairs, past the suspicious watchdogs and out onto the streets of Moscow.

“I hate those old women,” she mutters under her breath.

“Please, first I’d like to buy some treats for your friends,” I tell her. “Where can we go?”

“Oh, yes, the bakery. Come.”

We walk through the chill air along a grand Russian boulevard lined with baroque buildings and dart into the doorway of one that looks like a royal palace. It is now a bread hall.

I am amazed by all the customers inside, who have formed at least three different lines. Dour-faced men and women in heavy hats with gray scarves wrapped around their faces are lining up to choose what they want to buy from a glass-fronted display case.

I stand in line. A woman in a drab utilitarian uniform puts my pastry choices in a bag and hands me a ticket. I watch as my bag is taken away by another staff member in a uniform and a funny hat.

Kristina leads me to a second line, where I hand someone my ticket and pay for my pastries. Then a man gives me another ticket and points me to a third line, where I now have to wait to collect my goods.

The bread hall is my first glimpse of everyday life in Russia. They had a good idea: that everyone be employed and treated the same. I already know from listening to my journalist friends that the reality is quite different. The results are in plain sight. The human spirit is being crushed, and apathy has set in.

“My God. This is insane!” I tell Kristina. “What a screwed-up system! This whole process has taken almost an hour. It would have taken five minutes back home.”

She laughs out loud, hoists her son back up on her shoulders and off we go, down the narrow streets, continuing on our journey through life under Moscow’s communist rule.

With my hard-earned bag of pastries, I walk with Kristina and her son in the October morning and down some streets that grow narrower and narrower until the walls are only a few feet apart. I am on an epic journey into Russia’s past. I soak up everything I see—the architecture and the faces, the sounds and the smells of this great city, so full of history. There are very few cars, and many people are walking the streets. No one smiles very much. No one looks very happy. And no one looks me in the eye.

We reach a four-story building, and Kristina leads me inside. We are faced with the challenge of climbing the old wrought-iron staircase, whose steps are rusted out in the middle. Placing a foot carefully on each side of the step, being careful not to fall through the middle, we pick our way up and up and up to the top floor.

Kristina knocks on a heavy wooden door, and it is thrown open almost immediately. Facing us are dozens of smiling faces, all welcoming us in enthusiastically. Hands reaching out to us, they draw me into their large apartment with its floor-to-ceiling windows.

“My, what a large family!” I cry.

“This isn’t one family.” Kristina laughs. “This is three. They share three rooms. Everyone has own private corner. My friends live in this room.”

I pass by a small kitchen. On the stove a huge pot of something is bubbling.

Kristina’s friends have a beautiful blond child, aged about ten, called Sofia. She has a big, open face, and her hair is pulled into tight little plaited knobs of gold on either side of her ears. She could be my daughter. I hand her the bag of pastries. She gently takes it, smiles and says,
“Spasibo,”
before rushing off to the kitchen.

The light through the high bank of windows on one wall shines a
kind of a golden southern glow onto the table we are invited to sit at. It is beautiful. Along each windowsill sit prized tomato plants laden with dozens of cherry tomatoes, a rare gastronomic treat. The father plucks one and offers it to me. I take it and eat it with reverence. He is so proud of his garden. Fruit and vegetables are not easy to come by in Russia, I learn.

We are served steaming bowls of broth with fresh-baked bread and then the treats I have brought. The adults chatter away in Russian while Sofia sits staring at me, and her father throws his head back and laughs uproariously. Everyone else laughs along. I’m laughing too. I just don’t know why.

Kristina explains. “He said that Sofia went to school today with poem she wrote about nature and what God means to her. The schoolmaster summoned the father and tells him, ‘Your daughter must learn about the party, not art. Not God. Not allowed.’ He thinks this crazy.”

The family are still laughing, and I laugh along with them. Surely these are not members of the Communist Party.

Suddenly, Sofia tugs on my arm and gestures for me to go with her to her corner of the room. Secretively, she rummages under her bed and pulls out a little red change purse.

“You want to show me something?” I ask, picking up her thoughts. I have no idea what it is but I can tell it means a great deal to her, so I hold my breath, make my eyes big and look excited.

“What can it be?” I gasp as she giggles.

Reaching into the purse, she pulls out a collection of delicate seashells.

Kristina explains from across the room that Sofia collected them on a rare trip to the coast once. They are her prize possessions, and she handles them like rare jewels.

“They’re beautiful, honey, really beautiful,” I say, taking the time to touch each one and turn it over and examine it as she watches.

Sofia’s eyes are round and rich and full. I can feel her dreaminess, her wonder, her bohemian free will rolling around inside her. I am afraid it will be crushed by the system according to her birthright, or no right. I feel intense sadness at the thought that when she grows up, that look of
wonder in her eyes will almost certainly be replaced by the deadening gaze of the women I have already seen—people whose spirit has been squashed.

Cradling her shells in my hand, I continue to squeal with delight. “Oh, look at this little yellow one. Oh, and that pink one, with the big swirls on its shell. How lovely, Sofia. Thank you so much for showing them to me.”

Sofia takes my hand and opens it, dropping the seashells into my palm one by one. Then she closes my fingers around them. “Goooldie.” She speaks my name softly.

“No, no, no!” I shake my head vehemently. “I can’t possibly take them, my darling. But thank you so much for offering them to me.”

“Da.”
She nods, her big eyes confused. I can tell she is thinking that if I like them so much, then why don’t I want them?

“No.
Nyet,
” I say firmly, placing them back in her hands and closing my hands around hers. “You must keep them, Sofia.” Staring deeply into her eyes, I add: “These are yours to hold and yours to dream with. Keep them forever, never stop looking at them, and I will always remember you and your shells in a special place in my heart.”

She finally understands, and, with what seems like relief, puts the shells away under her bed. She offers me a hug instead. All I have to give in return is my love and my bag of pastries.

I leave that remarkable home reluctantly. They gave me so much—charm, hospitality, potato soup, laughter and love. I am left with the even stronger belief that family is the key to happiness.

Heading back to my hotel, I know that soon I will have to say good-bye to Kristina and return to a world that she may never see. I want to thank her for all she has done for me. I unclip the gold necklace from around my neck, the one my mother gave me for my birthday, and start to hand it to her.

“Here, I want you to have this.”

Kristina’s eyes register surprise and then alarm.
“Nyet!”
she hisses. “Not here. Your hotel. We go to your room.”

Her nervousness clear, we walk past the matron, who eyes her suspi
ciously. Only when we are safely in my room does Kristina graciously accept my gift, after placing her finger on my lips to make sure I don’t say anything that can be overheard. I try to put it around her neck, but she whispers, “
Nyet.
I put in pocket,” and secretes it away.

We hug then, both of us close to tears. She takes off down the corridor, past the watchful old woman, and back to a world I have only had a glimpse of. From the window of my room, I watch her walk down the street with her son—she is a great human being making the most of a tough life.

Despite what seem like insurmountable differences, I can feel myself falling in love with the Russian people, with their passion, their longing, their energy. I feel I understand them so much better now than I ever would have from reading articles or seeing films.

That night—my last—Murray takes me to a nightclub where I can observe young women of my own age. I had always imagined Russian women having high cheekbones and dark hair, like Kristina, all the features I was born without. But all I can see around me are round faces and big eyes. Dressed in their black-market clothes, they wear masses of eye makeup and bright red lipstick. The music is so loud I can hardly hear myself think. Everyone is dancing and drinking vodka and smoking cigarettes as if there were no tomorrow. Trying to keep a party alive inside of them. Living excessively, I guess, to make up for the lack of excess in everything else. There is great spirit here, a tremendous zest for life. It is all the more poignant for its apparent absence elsewhere in this city.

I sit down and observe with the zeal of a paleontologist who has just wandered into the Lost World. My God, I almost completely forgot why I came here in the first place. I do look like these women after all! They give me insight into my character. There is so much to work with here: my wardrobe, my makeup. Somehow it all seems so superficial.

D
riving back to the airport the following morning, I ponder how much I have learned from this trip. I feel sad. I realize that I will never see Kristina and her son, or Sofia and her family, again. By the time
I reach the airport, I am in such a haze of nostalgia for the wonders of this proud nation that I barely notice the armed guards, with their stiff suits and cardboard attitudes, as I hand them my papers.

“Nyet,”
an immigration officer tells me.

“Nyet?”
My attention snaps sharply back. “What do you mean,
Nyet
? These are my papers.”

“Nyet.”
They take my papers away.

My heart stops for a minute. I shift from a feeling of grand Russian romance and wishing I could stay here a little longer to a sense of blind panic.

Okay, wait a minute, I say to myself. I’ve got to get out of here. My heart palpitates as I see my Aeroflot plane revving up its engines out on the runway. I seriously consider making a run for it.

My voice a few octaves higher, I ask a guard, “Excuse me, is there a problem?” He doesn’t answer me.

Desperate for a cigarette, I reach into my purse and my fingers close around a bundle of pens that Murray advised me to bring as sweeteners but which I completely forgot about. Accepting them with a twisted smile, an official waves me through. “You are pleased to go.” He hands me my papers in exchange. Before he can change his mind, I dash past him out onto the tarmac and mount the stairs of my plane.

On the plane, I sit back in my seat, staring down at the lights of Moscow as we fly back west. Yes, I can play a Russian, but I could never be one. I understand their need to overcome obstacles, to make the best of their lives. I now know that their passion, love and art can never be extinguished, for it burns deep inside them. No matter what our political party, we are all individuals striving for happiness, just like Oktyabrina.