Russian Tattoo (2 page)

Robert asks him something, and the professor launches into what sounds like a lecture, most of which I don't understand. The words stream out of his mouth—words that sound vaguely familiar, yet distorted with the yawning vowels and the
r
's that have broken out of control in their mad attempt to take over other sounds. And the unseemly intonation: a wild rhythm galloping in all directions, like unbroken horses in Westerns I have yet to see. American English—all wrong, as my British-trained professors warned me back home. I spent fifteen years trying to master proper British English—the language no one seems to speak here.

In my family, no one spoke a foreign language, especially one as foreign as English. My mother knew the names of all the body parts in Latin, but Latin wasn't exotic; it was ancient and dead. My father spoke nothing but Russian. Marina studied French at her Moscow drama school, but French was so ingrained in Russian history that even my provincial aunt Muza sometimes said,
“Merci beaucoup
.
”
English was regal and mesmerizing, unknown and rarely heard. It was my way out of the ordinary life—the same escape my sister found in theater and acting. When I was ten, the year my father died, I insisted on learning English the same way Marina had earlier insisted on auditioning for the Moscow drama school.

Every day, for the three months of summer, I took a streetcar to a tutor's apartment to contort my mouth around unfamiliar sounds until it hurt, to learn the twelve tricky tenses, to make the bewildering discovery that Russian had no word for
privacy
. Thirteen years of English classes later, I'd been selected to teach Russian to visiting American students at the Leningrad University summer program. Robert was in my friend Nina's class. That was exactly a year ago.

I look around Robert's professor's kitchen as if it were another museum. “Would you like some cereal?” asks his wife, tall and broad-boned, not interested in her husband's lecture.

I imagine a pot with steaming farina,
mannaya kasha,
the cereal my sister refused to swallow when she was little. Marina would hold the kasha in her mouth for hours, her cheeks bulging, not letting even a drop slide down her throat. Unlike my sister, I've always liked farina, hot and gooey, made with milk and lots of sugar, a cube of butter slowly dissolving in the center of a steaming heap. But the professor's wife reaches for a cardboard box with a picture of brown flakes and raisins, and the mixture rattles into my bowl with the same sound you'd hear if you poured a handful of nails.

This is our last day in the capital of my new country because this evening we are driving to Robert's mother's house in New Jersey. The car Robert used to pick me up at the airport belongs to his father, he said with a glimmer of pride in his eyes at being the only American who doesn't own a vehicle.

The Washington air trembles with heat as we walk along a rectangular pool that seems to be steaming. Low, uniform buildings, a tall obelisk, huge expanses of space so strange in a major city. Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument. I should've brushed up on American history, as my university dean told me to do during his harangue about my betrayal of Leningrad University and the entire Soviet Union because I married an American.

I compare what I see to our capital, Moscow, where the scale of everything is so much grander. I think of our May 1, Labor Day, marches and Victory Day parades that are supposed to energize us with their rows of tanks and lines of rockets rolling past the Lenin Mausoleum; of endless lines for Czech mascara, bologna, and Polish boots. We cannot afford to smile at every customer in Russia or wrap each sandwich, even if we had the meat or the paper, even if we had a word for
service
.

“Let's stop for iced tea,” says Robert and points to a café entrance.

I am stunned that you can simply stop for a drink here—a random detour, a result of an individual's whim—and no one is going to yell at you for trying to be special, for standing out from the collective. But I am even more astonished at the notion of iced tea. What kind of sacrilege is this? Everyone knows that tea must be served scalding hot. I don't say anything to Robert as I consider this just American ignorance. But I also think of the waitress who didn't scowl at us as we sat at her table and who pretended that our order of iced tea was exactly what she'd been waiting for. It was so utterly un-Soviet in its cheeriness that it made me giggle.

“Life's a kopek,” my mother would always say, and now I think I am beginning to understand what our most popular proverb really means.

How am I going to get used to all this sudden worthiness?

Three

M
y new mother-in-law lives in a
pomestie
nestled in the woods called Princeton, New Jersey. A
pomestie
is a sprawling country house with land, a kind of dwelling surrounded by an orchard as thick as a forest, where many of Chekhov's characters lamented their lives and yearned for Moscow. At first glance, my mother-in-law didn't seem to lament anything. She pressed me to her soft T-shirt that said
WOMEN UNITE
and we had sweet drinks made from a dark cordial I'd never seen. My tongue wouldn't contort to calling the woman I'd just met
mother
, so I call her Millie.

As I explored the vast premises of Millie's estate, I knew my real mother was fretting in our Leningrad kitchen across from my older sister, wondering if I'd already settled down to live under a bridge or was begging on the street, like most Americans. We all saw a recent Soviet documentary shot in New York and broadcast on our TV at least three times before I left.
A Man from Fifth Ave.
showed men and women sleeping on the pavement amid a crowd of indifferent capitalists on their way to restaurants and stores. I haven't yet seen the real Fifth Avenue, with half its population begging for scraps, so what I can write back home has no relevance to anyone in Leningrad. What can I possibly tell my family that they would understand? That roads in New Jersey are jammed with cars they've never seen? That supermarkets nearby are the size of stadiums, brimming with foods they couldn't even dream up? That no matter how hard I look, I haven't seen even one line?

I wrote in my letter that Robert had caught a cold and I was treating him with tea and honey, in the absence of raspberry jam from the dacha. I wrote that Millie appreciated the set of painted spoons and the shawl with roses my mother had procured through her medical connections. I wrote nothing about the aquarium feeling of unreality that has settled inside me since I stepped off the plane in Washington.

Millie is a psychotherapist, said Robert, a profession mysterious to everyone raised on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In a second house that hides behind thick rhododendron bushes, she runs something called the Academy for Experiential Development. I know about rhododendrons from a Fitzgerald novel, but I've never seen the word
experiential
before, so I thought that the sign said “experimental development.” It makes me wonder, as I look across the lawn trying to peer through the thicket of branches, what kinds of psychological experiments Millie carries out there on her patients. I could ask Robert about the experiments, but I don't want to sound more clueless than I must already seem. I don't want to pester him to explain psychotherapy, in addition to everything else he has to explain to me. Back home we had physical therapists and medical therapists to deal with various malfunctions of the body, but our psyches—the products of our bright future and heroic past—were all supposed to be uniform and healthy. When they were not, we called our friends and sat in their kitchens until the blackness behind the window became diluted with the first rays of gray dawn. We talked about love and parents, drinking acidic wine and exchanging homegrown advice not based on any theories, especially those of Freud, whose books were safely locked away in secret vaults of the Central Library, away from most readers' eyes.

With her professional power to analyze the human mind, Millie has quickly figured out that I need a new pair of shoes. The only pair I brought with me, the best shoes I've ever owned—thanks to a friend with connections—is Hungarian and made of real leather. They have black laces in the front and thick rubber soles perfect for April in Leningrad, when the snow turns into dirty porridge and walking becomes wading. But now it is August in Princeton, and with the sun melting the asphalt behind the window, they look out of place.

On the third day after our arrival at her house, Millie takes me to a shoe store. Alarmingly, it is full of shoes. Loafers, espadrilles, ballerina slippers, pumps, clogs, flip-flops, sandals—in colors that bring to mind Matisse paintings hanging in the Hermitage; with heels, skinny and solid, high and low, and with no heels at all—are perched on gleaming plastic stands that radiate from the center of the room for as far as my eyes can see.

“What do you like?” Millie asks and smiles from above her glasses. She is shorter than I am, with a haircut that would look boyish if her hair weren't graying. As she patiently waits, pretending to examine a pair of pumps with stiletto heels no one could possibly walk on, I realize she wants me to make a choice. My heart sinks. I desperately look around, and a saleswoman promptly sidles up to us. “How may I help you?” she asks in a syrupy voice that makes my stomach queasy. They are both looking at me now, waiting for an answer with the same frustration Robert must have felt when he ordered me a hamburger, expecting me to choose one perfect drop in a glittering ocean of footwear. They wait and wait as the ocean rises to my nostrils and threatens to drown me. I take a deep breath as if it were my last. What can I possibly say to them? That Leningrad shoe stores had two models on the floor, both made from rubberized plastic that mangles feet, both produced by the Bolshevik Woman factory in Minsk? That I have no idea how much any of these shimmering shoes cost and how their prices correlate with my new mother-in-law's budget? That I don't even know what American shoe size I wear?

Millie finally says something to the saleswoman, who vanishes and then reappears holding a hefty metal gauge with end pieces that look like teeth. The word
torture
rushes to the surface of my mind and freezes there. The woman motions for me to take off my Hungarian shoes and step onto the cold surface of her metal instrument. I cringe as I unlace, baring my hot, sweaty foot. The teeth lurch forward, then stop. Seven and a half, says the woman and grins. Back home I wore size thirty-six, which makes me think of my sister's joke: the Soviet Union proudly announced to the world that it produced the biggest of everything—the largest microchip, the tallest dwarf. I see Millie holding a pair of sandals—a half-inch sole with an elegant band across the instep—that wrap perfectly around my feet. The saleswoman curls her lips in a smile and nods her head in satisfaction, as if she was the one who cobbled those sandals together and made them fit.

“Why don't you wear them out of the store?” suggests Millie, a question I don't understand. Wear them out? They are brand-new, American, leather, perfectly fitting sandals that have to be revered. How can I wear them out? How can I trivialize a pair of shoes that are going to replace my Hungarian wonders? These are shoes that have to be celebrated, tried on in front of a mirror at home, admired, and exalted before I can slip my feet into their perfect straps and announce them to the world.

“No, let's take them with us,” I say, putting back on my old shoes, which suddenly begin to pinch. I can't see the saleswoman's face, but I am sure she is bemused. As Millie pays, I glance in the mirror, conveniently attached to one of the shoe pedestals. What I see is sorrowful and depressing: my previously glamorous Hungarian shoes have instantly lost their luster; the words
bolshevik
woman
might as well be scrawled all over their surface. I hobble out of the store with the boxed sandals in my hands, Millie trotting behind me, probably questioning her son's sanity as I am questioning my own. Why, despite all logical reasons, couldn't I bring myself to take the new sandals out of the box and wear them, as people here obviously do, as I should have done if I ever want to learn to fit in? Why am I so stubborn, so foolish, so unable to conform? Why am I so utterly un-American? My old shoes pull on my feet like lead weights as I walk out into the foreign heat, doubting my whole future in this glimmering land of glut.

On Wednesday a woman in her early forties spends most of the day in Millie's house vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing. I don't know her first name because Millie calls her Mrs. Conover.

Mrs. Conover is the first black person I have ever met. Back in Leningrad, a handful of students from African nations studied at our universities, attracting astonished stares that quickly turned to mild disgust on the faces of passersby who had never seen a live person with skin so much darker than their own. Among the foreign students in my mother's anatomy class was Amir, a young man from Kenya, who spent his school vacations on trips to Paris to stock up on a new wardrobe. “He just took off for France, for two days,” my mother used to say with reproach that seemed to apply more to the trips' brevity than to their destination. I'd never seen Amir, and when I tried to conjure him up, there was nothing to anchor the image. I had no idea what good clothes looked like, so all I could think of was a university poster where a muscular Negro in chains was trampled on by a tiny fat white man in a top hat. My aunt Muza from the provinces couldn't understand why a black man who, according to
Pravda,
is supposed to be ruthlessly exploited by societies that—unlike us—haven't yet tasted equality, was flying twice a year to France to buy suits.

“He is a prince,” explained my mother, repeating Amir's words. “Related to the king of his country.”

“Related to the king of the jungle, maybe,” said my provincial aunt, more attuned to what most Russians thought about nonwhites. “And where in the jungle could he even learn about Paris?” My aunt Muza, an obstetrician in a small town on the Volga River, delivered these words with unquestionable certainty that filled every corner of our kitchen. Although my aunt herself would never be allowed to cross the border to visit any European capital, even one in the Soviet bloc, she undoubtedly knew more about Paris than some brazen African prince who had the arrogance to get on an intercontinental flight to replenish his wardrobe on the Champs-Elysées.

Mrs. Conover, as I sense, is far from going on shopping sprees in Paris. She arrives by bus, wearing a plaid shirt and pants with an elastic waist, reticent and efficient in what she's been doing every week for probably longer than I've been learning English.

“So how are you?” she asks me when she enters. I am surprised by her desire to know about the life of someone she'd never met, but I dutifully recite what we did this past week: a bus trip to New York and a walk along Fifth Avenue, where no one was begging, a stroll around the Gothic towers of Princeton, my first horror film on television, where a fifteen-foot-tall bear kept popping out of the woods to terrorize a summer camp. I loved that movie, I say, proud of the newly acquired American word for what I knew as
film
.

“Here is a can of tuna if you'd like some lunch, Mrs. Conover,” Millie murmurs, interrupting me. “And coffee, and a Danish, although it's a little stale.” She smiles apologetically at her failure to run to the store this morning for a fresh piece of pastry.

Robert says he's never seen Mrs. Conover take a sip of coffee or open a tuna can, but Millie is persistent. She wants to be fair to the domestic help, he says, and that's why she calls her cleaning lady by her last name. He also tells me I don't have to answer the simple question of “How are you?” with a story of my life.

Robert sits on a kitchen stool next to me, watching in amazement as I shake a bottle of ketchup over a bar of cream cheese. I am on a tasting spree of all the foods I've never had. Yesterday I gobbled spoonfuls of whipped cream, and the day before I fished out olives from a tall, thin jar I found in the door of Millie's refrigerator.

Mrs. Conover is bending over a vacuum cleaner, pulling it up the stairs in vigorous spasms, making me think of the poster that hung in the Leningrad University hallway.

“Yet another example of capitalist exploitation,” I say to Robert, scooping a spoonful of cream cheese into my mouth, nodding toward Mrs. Conover, who is jerking the vacuum cleaner up to the second floor.

Robert squints at me, confused. He silently regards the cream cheese with ketchup I've been eating, the same way he earlier looked at the old Hungarian shoes I wore in ninety-five-degree heat.

“She's paid well for this work,” he says finally, thinking that I'm serious, that he needs to vouch for his mother's social integrity.

I wonder if my mother ever thought of buying fresh pastry for the woman who used to help around our apartment when I was little. She called her Nelka, a diminutive of Nelly, and I am sure the thought of using her patronymic for respect never crossed my mother's mind. The formality of Nelly Ivanovna or Nelly Petrovna would sound preposterous in our dilapidated kitchen, not nearly big enough for such magnanimity. Every day except Sunday, Nelka stayed with me in our apartment until I turned five and was admitted to nursery school. All day, while my mother taught anatomy at her medical institute, Nelka shuttled between our refrigerator and our stove, whipping up panfuls of fried potatoes with onions and buckets of cabbage soup, pouring kettles of hot water over the dishes in the sink before she washed them with an old stocking. She boiled milk in a dented, blackened pot and made me drink a cup with breakfast and lunch. As it cooled, the milk would form a film on top, like a layer of skin, and I would beg Nelka to skim it off because its grainy, papery texture would make me gag. “I hate boiled milk! I hate the skin on top!” I wailed, knowing that Nelka would always relent.