Russian Tattoo

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For Andy and Laurenka

Cut yourself free of what you love and hope that the wound heals.

—J. M. C
OETZEE
,
S
UMMERTIME

P
ART 1

Robert

One

I
wish I could clear my mind and focus on my imminent American future. I am twelve kilometers up in the air—forty thousand feet, according to the new, nonmetric system I have yet to learn. Every time I glance at the overhead television screen that shows the position of my Aeroflot flight, this future is getting closer. The miniature airplane is like a needle over the Atlantic, stitching the two hemispheres together with the thread of our route. I wish I could get ready and dredge my mind of all the silt of my previous life. But I can't. I can't help but think of my mother's crumpled face back in Leningrad airport, of her gaze, open, like a fresh wound, of her smells of the apple jam from our dacha mixed with the sharp odor of formaldehyde she'd brought home from the medical school where she teaches anatomy. I can't help but think of my sister Marina's tight embrace and her hair the color of apricots, one fruit that failed to grow in our dacha garden my grandfather planted. Ten hours earlier, I said good-bye to both of them.

In my Leningrad courtyard, where a taxi was waiting to take us to the airport, a small girl with braids had crouched on the ledge of a sandbox: green eyes, slightly slanted, betraying the drop of Tatar ancestry in every Russian; faint freckles, as if someone had splashed muddy water onto her skin. As the plane taxied past evergreen forests and riveted itself into the low Russian sky, I longed to be that girl, not ready to leave, still comfortable on the ledge of her childhood sandbox.

When I am not watching the plane advance westward on the screen, I talk to my neighbor, a morose-looking American with thin-rimmed glasses and a plastic cup of vodka in his hand. He has just warned me, between sips of Stolichnaya, that I will never find a teaching job in the United States. He is a former professor of Russian literature, bitter and disillusioned, and, as we glide over Greenland, he dismisses my approaching American future with a single wave of his hand. “You should go back home,” he says, staring into his glass and rattling the ice cubes. “It's 1980, and what you're looking for in the U.S. no longer exists. You'll be happier with your family in Russia.”

My family in Russia would applaud this statement—especially my mother, who thinks I'll be begging on the streets and sleeping under a bridge, as
Pravda
has informed her.

I know I should tell this Russian expert that my new American husband is waiting for me at the airport, probably with a list of teaching jobs in his pocket. I should tell him to mind his own business. I should tell him that no one in Russia puts ice in drinks or ever sips vodka. But I don't. I am a docile ex–Young Pioneer who only this morning left the Soviet Union, a ravaged suitcase on the KGB inspector's table with twenty kilograms of what used to be my life.

In the sterile maze of Washington Dulles International Airport, an official pulls me into a little room, tells me to sit down, and points a camera at my face. A flash goes off and I blink. Another man in uniform dips my index finger in ink and presses it to paper. “Sign and date here.” He points to a line, and I write my name and the date, August 10, 1980. “Here is your green card,” he says and hands me a small rectangular piece of plastic. I don't know why he calls it a green card. It is white, with a fingerprint in the middle to certify that the bewildered face is mine.

I feel as if I were inside an aquarium, sensing everything through layers of water, clear and still and deeper than I know, with real life happening to other people behind the glass. They are pulling suitcases that roll magically behind them; they are waiting for their flights in docile, passive lines—all without color or sound, like a silent film. With a new identity bestowed on me by the card between my fingers, I float out of the immigration office, the weight of my suitcase strangely diminished, as though the value of my Russian possessions has instantly shrunk with the strike of the immigration stamp. The sign in front of me points an arrow to something called
restroom
, although I can see it is not going to dispense any rest. The floor gleams here, the hand dryers whir, and the faucets sparkle—
restroom
is a perfect word for this luxury that seems to have emerged straight from the spotless future of science fiction. I think of the rusty toilets of Pulkovo International Airport I just left, of their corroded pipes and sad, hanging pull chains that never release enough water to wash away the lowly feeling of barely being human.

In the waiting crowd I make out Robert, my new American husband, a man I barely know. He is peering in my direction through his thick glasses, not yet able to see me among the exiting passengers. It feels odd to apply the word
husband
to a tall stranger in corduroy jeans and tight springs of black hair around his waiting face. And what about me? Do I want to be a wife, the word that in Russia mostly conjures standing: on lines, at bus stops, by the stove?

Five months earlier, Robert came to Leningrad to marry me, to my mother's horror. We stood in the wedding hall of the Acts of Marriage Palace on the Neva embankment—a small flock of my mortified relatives and close friends—in front of a woman in a red dress with a wide red ribbon across her chest, who recited a speech about the creation of a new society cell. The speech was modified for international marriages: there was no reference to our future contributions to the Soviet cause or to the bright dawn of communism.

To be honest, the possibility of leaving Russia was never as thrilling as the prospect of leaving my mother. My mother, a mirror image of my Motherland—overbearing and protective, controlling and nurturing—had spun a tangle of conflicted feelings as interlaced as the nerves and muscles in her anatomy charts I'd copied since I was eight. Our apartment on Maklina Prospekt was the seat of the politburo; my mother, its permanent chairman. She presided in our kitchen over a pot of borsch, ordering me to eat in the same voice that made her anatomy students quiver. She sheltered me from dangers, experience, and life itself by an embrace so tight that it left me innocent and gasping for air and that sent me fumbling through the first ordeals of adulthood. She had survived the famine, Stalin's terror, and the Great Patriotic War, and she controlled and protected, ferociously. What had happened to her was not going to happen to Marina and me.

Robert and I met last summer, during the six-week Russian program for American students at Leningrad University, where I was teaching. For the last two weeks of classes—the time we spent walking around the city—I showed him my real hometown, those places too ordinary to be included among the glossy snapshots of bronze statues and golden domes. We walked along the cracked asphalt side streets where crumbling arches lead into mazes of courtyards, those wells out of Dostoyevsky that depress the spirit and twist the soul into a truly miserable Russian knot. If the director of the program, or her KGB husband, had known I was spending time with an American, I wouldn't now be gawking at the splendor of the airport in Washington, DC. After four months of letters, Robert came back to Leningrad in December to offer to marry me if I wanted to leave the country—on one condition: I had to understand that he wasn't ready to get married.

He wasn't ready to settle down with one person, Robert said. He wanted to continue seeing other women, particularly his colleague Karen, who taught Russian in Austin, where he was working on his PhD in physics. We would have an open marriage, he said. “An open marriage?” I repeated as we were walking toward my apartment building in Leningrad. It was minus twenty-five degrees Celsius and the air was so cold it felt like shards of glass scraping inside my throat as we clutched onto each other because the sidewalk was solid ice.

I didn't know
marriage
could be paired with an adjective gutting the essence of the word's meaning, but then I didn't know lots of things. I didn't know, for example, that my mother, who has always been in love with propriety and order, had two marriages before she met my father—two short-lived, hasty unions, of which neither one seemed perfect or even good. I didn't know, before my university friends told me, that it was legal to marry a foreigner and leave the country. My mother had diligently sheltered me from the realities of Russian life; my Motherland had kept all other ways of life away from everyone within its borders. We were crowded on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain, clad in ill-fitting garb and ignorant about the rest of the world.

“I understand,” I said to Robert on that frosty day in Leningrad­—words that hung in the air in a small cloud of frozen breath—­although I really didn't.

Two

R
obert and I are walking around the airy rooms of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. The Air and Space Museum is full of planes suspended from the ceiling, boasting their antiquated, propeller innocence. We are staring at space capsules where you can sit in a cosmonaut's chair and pretend you are flying through space. “I'm Yuri Gagarin,” says Robert in Russian and pushes the buttons on the dashboard, making me giggle.

This morning, as the plane was descending over the unfamiliar contours of my new country's capital, I tried to conjure up my husband, a word that sounds strange when applied to the man showing me all these space wonders. What if he had been absent from the crowd at the airport? What if he'd come to his senses and realized, as the surly Russian literature professor on the plane informed me, that my prospects here are not very promising?

For a week before our wedding in March, Robert and I had stayed at the apartment of Galya, my half sister from my father's earlier marriage, not without the silent comment of compressed lips from my mother, who pointed out how inappropriate it was for two people to live in one place prior to the moment the state pronounces them officially married. I loved that week of being away from my family, of pretending to be married to someone so exotic and unknown. I even thought I loved Robert. When we first found ourselves in bed, we were both tentative, as if afraid to discover in each other something alien and ghastly. But the only foreign part of American sex turned out to be a supply of prophylactics.

Back in Leningrad, I loved Robert's foreignness. I loved that he represented the forbidden and the unknown, that his nationality made people gasp. I loved that Robert had lifted me above the collective and I could be the opposite of what we all were in Russia, cynical and meek. The opposite of what our souls had become, cleaved and schizophrenic. I could heal and fuse the two parts of me together, I thought. I would no longer be a yearning Soviet teenage Pioneer vying for state-sanctioned approval, or a little sister begging Marina to take me backstage, or a docile grown-up marching in step with everybody else.

The air of the museum is cool and odorless. The cool, I know, comes from air-conditioning, a capitalist invention I read about in an American novel, but why are there no smells? Russia assaults you in your nostrils: milk always on the verge of turning sour, the wet wool of winter coats we wear every day for five months, rubber phone booth tiles buckled with urine, exhaust from trucks that run on leaded gasoline, mothballs, yesterday's soup. Here, despite thirty-four degrees Celsius outside (ninety-three Fahrenheit, says Robert)—a temperature I know only from books on the Soviet republics of Central Asia—it smells of nothing. People who pass by don't trail the odor of unwashed clothes, and the museum cafeteria where we stop to have lunch doesn't reek of boiled cabbage and dishrags made from old stockings crisscrossed by runs beyond repair.

I don't even know if I should call the antiseptic space with the sparkly floor and smiling cashiers a cafeteria. Where are the bread crumbs and the dried puddles of cabbage soup? Where are the empty napkin holders—napkins stolen for toilet paper—and where are the flies? And what is a gleaming ketchup bottle doing on every table, open to anyone's cravings?

“What would you like?” asks Robert, a simple question I can't answer since the menu on the wall contains no words I recognize. I stand in front of the counter, dumb and mute and wishing for a miraculous hand to pluck me out of this awkward silence. I squeeze out a mousy “I don't know,” as if this were my first American test and I have instantly failed it. Should I admit to Robert that I've never heard of burgers, hot dogs, or French fries? Should I say I'm not hungry and simply ask for tea? Robert shrugs and says something to the girl behind the counter. A few minutes later, she hands him two paper boxes and he motions for me to sit at one of the spotless tables. We haven't yet eaten together, just the two of us, and I am hoping for this to be good, the first meal of our marriage, even if it isn't quite a real marriage.

Robert opens the packages and they reveal something that looks like a small loaf of bread stuffed with layers of meat and salad. I don't know how to approach this bread concoction, so I stare at it without moving.

“It's a hamburger,” says Robert. “You eat it like a sandwich.”

“Like a ham sandwich,” I say, happy to finally understand something.

“No, not like a ham sandwich,” says Robert and shakes his head. “That's just its name, a hamburger. Try it.”

I don't know how to try it. It looks so imposing sitting there in its own container, staring back at me as I try to figure out how to wrap my mouth around it. I cast a furtive glance to see if anyone is using a knife and a fork. No one is. Robert takes his hamburger out of its box, presses the bread down with his fingers, and takes a bite. When I do the same, a rivulet of ketchup squirts out and pulls with it some bits of lettuce, which land on my sundress. A woman at the next table stops eating and gives me a pitiful glance.

“I'm sorry,” I mumble with my mouth full, not knowing what else to say, not knowing whether I should say anything at all, as I get up and head for the restroom to wash off the ketchup. I am wearing the only dress I own, and I can't afford to have it stained.

When I come back, after scrubbing the stains off with hand soap and then holding my skirt up to the dryer, Robert has already finished his hamburger and asks me if I want to finish mine. I weigh in my mind if a few bites of food are worth risking another round of scrubbing and drying. They aren't, so I shake my head. He scoops up our boxes, his empty one and mine with most of my hamburger still in, and drops them into a trash bin. Our table is as gleaming as it was before we sat down. I look back at the perfectly aligned chairs painted in light blue and rust colors, at a young man in uniform sliding a mop around the immaculate tile floor. A tide of questions swirls in my head, stupid questions I'll never have the nerve to ask. Is every hamburger here so special that it deserves its own individual container? What else in this country is as disposable as these paper boxes? Why would anyone toss perfectly good food into the trash?

On my first full day in the United States, I wake up to unreality, emerging from a dream about my father's funeral. He died fourteen years ago, when I was ten. “Smoked since he was nine,” my mother lamented to a neighbor on that day. “So what do you expect?” I didn't know what she'd hoped for, but I expected him to stay alive. In our neighbor's apartment, after the funeral, his friends from the Leningrad Technical School drank vodka toasts to his shining memory, to his party leadership, to my mother, my sisters, and me. Uncle Volodya, my father's driver, asked everyone to drink to my father's fishing. “The greatest happiness of his life was sitting in a boat with his line cast,” he said, long bags under his eyes making his face even sadder as my mother pursed her lips because she probably considered herself to have been the greatest happiness of his life.

I thought of the Renaissance paintings in the Hermitage, where our third-grade teacher, Vera Pavlovna, had taken our class the previous spring, of souls fluttering in the clouds alongside harp-playing angels. “We no longer believe in heaven,” she announced, standing next to an icon, and a week later, as if to make the point, arranged a school trip to the Museum of Religion and Atheism at Kazan Cathedral. As we stood in front of the gilded altar, Vera Pavlovna condemned the atavisms of the tsarist past as backward beliefs about heaven and afterlife.

“Heaven is church mythology made up in an effort to suppress the populace,” she said. “To distract their attention from everyday struggles.”

I liked the Hermitage elongated angels and Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna with a fat baby in her arms. But our teacher told us to think of all those floating souls in the densely populated skies as nothing but symbols, the way a snake under the feet of Peter the Great's horse in the Bronze Horseman monument on the Neva River was a symbol of all the tsar's enemies who didn't want him to build a city on a cold swamp infested with mosquitoes. The same way Pushkin's poems teemed with speaking souls and fiery prophets. And though I hated to agree with our teacher who demanded that we marched in step with the school collective, I found it difficult to believe that anyone could still hope to rise to heaven after death. You died in a hospital, like my father, and then you were buried in the ground.

In a dream I had about my father's funeral, Uncle Volodya announced he was leaving. I got up and lurked in the doorway between the living room and the entrance hallway so he would notice me, because in my mind he was directly linked to my father.

“He was a good man,” said Uncle Volodya and patted me on the cheek.

I wondered if I would ever see Uncle Volodya again, and that thought suddenly made me so sad that I could feel the tears rising, but I swallowed hard and pretended I was coughing. Uncle Volodya put on a raincoat and a hat, his skin hanging under his eyes and around his mouth as if tired of holding on to his face. Then the heavy double doors locked behind him and he was gone.

I tried not to think about Uncle Volodya anymore; I tried not to think about my father. I stood in the hallway's soft dusk under a coatrack, trying not to think at all, but thoughts marched in, like columns of the suppressed populace protesting the church's mythology of heaven. I thought of the only time I went fishing with my father: a slippery perch glistening in my hands, a purple worm squiggling in an inch of water on the bottom of the boat, my father's fingers, black from dirt, hooking it onto the end of my fishing rod.

As I wake up, unfamiliar images float in through gummy eyes: a bulky dresser with a giant television, a floor covered with something soft and beige, a wool blanket without a duvet cover. The walls are naked, too, not sheathed with wallpaper.

I can almost smell the woody musk of our Leningrad armoire in the room where my mother and I slept, the dusty air of Marina's room with the two pieces of furniture required for every respectable home: a cupboard filled with cut crystal and a piano called Red October. I hated dusting the cupboard and the piano. I hated practicing the piano, too, and this double aversion kept me away from my sister's room, which suited us both. But now my Leningrad bed next to my mother's, with its white duvet and square pillow, floats in my memory, feathery and warm, next to an undusted sideboard full of porcelain ballerinas and a bottle of my mother's sweet perfume called Red Moscow. I used to sit in front of her triple mirror, where nothing interesting was ever reflected, and wonder whether I could ever leave. And now, half a world away, I can smell that perfume.

It takes a few minutes for alien objects to come into focus, until one thing becomes sharp and real: I am no longer home.

It is early morning, and we go down to the kitchen full of strange bottles on the counter and cardboard boxes in the cabinets. The house belongs to a former professor of Robert's, who let us stay here for two days before we drive to New Jersey, where Robert's mother lives. The professor is round and balding and doesn't look at all professorial.