Russian Tattoo (29 page)

P
ART 4

Mama

Forty-Four

T
here was a time—those first few years of my life that do not leave an imprint on the memory—when Mama and I were one. When I was still attached to her by so many invisible strings, when we shared one soul. When she woke up in the middle of the night to check if I was breathing in my crib, when I somehow knew that she was bending over me, smelling of sleep. We were one: she was in me and I was in her, and she knew what I wanted at any given moment, and I knew what she was ready to give: everything. I can glean this from old photographs, those snapshots taken at home where I used to melt into her arms, burrowing into her chest, curling up in her lap. At five or six I would roll into Mama's bed because my feet were cold. I would press into her with my entire body, squeezing my feet under her soft thighs, stealing her warmth. “They're cold like frogs, your little
nozhki
,” she used to murmur, warming me with her embrace.

Then we separated. Was it in first grade, when no one picked me up on the first day of school because of a miscommunication between Mama and the teacher, when I walked home alone, surrounded by clanging streetcars and rumbling trucks, basking in my power to be able to cross streets by myself? Was it when the three of us—Mama, Marina, and I—stood in a phone booth, rain streaking down the glass, my wooden fingers dialing my father's hospital number, the indifferent voice on the other end of the line saying that he had died?

When did Sasha separate from me? I remember looking at her standing in our living room holding on to the side of the coffee table. She had just learned how to walk, making little steps, wobbly and tentative yet resolute. She ambled forward on her own, refusing help, and I had an intense, almost physical sensation at that moment that our paths had begun to part.

Every week Mama speaks on the phone with the mothers of my two Leningrad girlfriends, Tania and Julia. Tania, with whom I shared the last two years of high school, has two grown sons and now lives near Princeton, an hour and a half away, with her husband and mother. Julia, who studied with me at the English department of Leningrad University, lives with her husband and mother in Nutley. Mama did not know Faina or Irina—Tania's and Julia's mothers—when she lived in Leningrad, but here they are her close friends, in the absence of the real friends she left behind. Since she was the first mother to arrive in this country, she gives them survival advice and teaches them what is expected here.

Mama introduces them to
Wheel of Fortune,
which she turns on at seven every evening, sometimes guessing the words before the contestants do. She tells Faina and Irina to watch the Weather Channel, easy to understand because it has pictures of little suns and clouds. She explains the idea of coupons and the necessity of taking calcium. But most important, she tells them how to behave around their sons-in-law. She is shrewd, my mother, steeled by famine and war, trained by the decades of Soviet doublethink, so she has already mastered this strategy. She has learned not to say anything even when her daughter and son-in-law go to a restaurant, ignoring a pot of stew waiting in the refrigerator, even when they buy a brand-new television and throw out the old one simply because the remote control no longer works. She has learned to be silent about all the waste she witnesses in this country: lights she has had to switch off, unused leftovers she has clandestinely removed from our refrigerator and relocated to her tiny icebox downstairs, plastic shopping bags she has rescued from the garbage.

Now, with the authority earned by time, she shares the skills she has acquired with my friends' mothers, her new audience. From the height of her American experience, she teaches them not to criticize their sons-in-law in front of their daughters.

“Don't say anything,” she advises in her teacher's voice into the phone. “You can think anything you want, but keep it to yourself. After all, the husband is the one who works, who brings home the money. He takes care of everything in the house; he takes care of you.”

She gives examples of how she has learned to keep the commentary to herself, despite her disapproval. “My daughter and her husband—ours—have been dressing Sasha as if they lived in the tropics.” Mama always calls the family and relatives
ours
,
svoi
, as opposed to all those
chuzhoi
, unworthy of our sympathy and our telephone time. “It came from Andy, I'm sure of it—this American disregard for cold seasons, this obsession with ice and air-­conditioning. And Lenochka, by now, has become infected with this silly nonsense, too.”

Lenochka, she calls me, the diminutive of my name she has used since I was born. As usual, I am annoyed at Mama for making comments about my life, but her Lenochka rolls off her tongue like a piece of caramel, softening and melting the edges of my resentment.

“But do I say anything when they rattle ice out of the freezer or turn the air conditioner on full blast?” she questions into the phone. “I know that Sasha and I are sure to come down with a sore throat from all that frozen water and cold drafts, yet I say nothing. Not a single word.”

She has said nothing since Andy, usually self-possessed, flung that pan of
kotlety
at our kitchen wall a few years ago. My mother cried and sulked and occupied her time by reading Russian thrillers and watching news from Moscow in her basement. But after a week of silence, she came up to the kitchen and made
chanakhi
, Andy's favorite Georgian soup with eggplant and lamb, letting us know by her cooking that she understood and accepted our changed roles. After all, as one of her favorite sayings advises,
When things are good you don't search for better
.

I hear her phone conversations with my girlfriends' mothers when I am in the kitchen by the basement door, and I often stay there for a minute or two to listen, just as I did in Leningrad, when Mama and Marina talked behind the door about something I was not supposed to hear.

“Of course, you and I know what's right,” says Mama, to give a bit of consolation to herself and her new friends. “Americans are so carefree and naïve. They never had to struggle, never fought an enemy on their land, like we did. But we're living in this country. We have to adapt because things are different here.”

Things are different here. I am the one who teaches at a college. I am the one who shops and cooks. I am the one now who worries about scarves and schools, soup and order.

I want to think that Mama no longer feels she needs to control and protect, as she did in Russia. There are no commissars here and no lines bristling with elbows. There are no party cells and mandatory meetings, no shortages of mayonnaise or winter boots. But old habits linger, and when I load her shopping cart with buckwheat and farmer cheese, she still scrutinizes the receipts in search of errors, just as she did back home. Like most Russian immigrants, she frowns at gays, illegal immigrants, and the Democratic Party, despite the fact that she is on Medicaid and SSI.

But she is also practical, my mother. She knows her life is good here. On holidays, she buys us cards with puppies and roses. To help me, she cuts out quick dinner recipes, photos of new fashions, and horoscopes, piling them up on the kitchen counter, along with advice on college majors for Sasha from the Russian-language newspaper published in Brooklyn.

Forty-Five

E
very two months I take my mother to the doctor. He is the same doctor who treated her when she complained about dizziness during her first visit here, in 1983, the doctor who almost fainted after he checked her blood pressure.

“Two thirty over one ten,” he announced in a grave voice and checked it again, to make absolutely sure. “I need to send her to the hospital,” he said, frowning, and it took me some time to convince him not to. I promised I would keep her resting on the couch, faithfully taking the medicine he had prescribed and measuring her blood pressure at regular intervals with the portable machine I bought at Rite Aid. “Here is my home number,” said the doctor, scribbling it on a piece of paper. “Call me tonight if things get worse.”

The next day, Saturday, Mama's blood pressure came down, and since that first encounter, Dr. Klughaupt's office has become a regular destination.

“How could she have lived in Russia with untreated hypertension?” he asked when we returned for an office visit.

From the slight curl in her mouth, I knew Mama was pleased and grateful that Dr. Klughaupt asked about her past. She laughed and told him her blood pressure story, which I translated bit by bit.

She went to a clinic in Leningrad just before her trip to the United States. The doctor, a woman in her fifties, with small eyes empty of compassion and thin, graying hair pulled back into a bun, sat behind the desk. She took my mother's blood pressure and wrote down the numbers in her logbook in neat, bureaucratic handwriting. No muscle twitched in her face: in her thirty-year tenure at the Central Cardiology Clinic, she had seen it all.

“How is my blood pressure?” my mother asked. “Is it still high?”

“How old are you?” said the doctor and put down her pen.

“Sixty-eight.”

“Well, of course your blood pressure is high. What did you expect? It should be high at your age.” The doctor's voice had an accusing tone as she trained her eyes on my mother's face. “You should know this yourself, you're a physician,” she said, glancing at my mother's chart. “We don't treat sixty-eight-year-olds for hypertension. There is absolutely nothing we can do.” It was my mother's fault. She had the nerve to trudge to the clinic, climb to the fifth floor, and take up the woman's valuable time with a problem as untreatable as old age.

“Ten flights of Russian stairs,” Mama says. Dr. Klughaupt's eyes stare out at her in disbelief from behind his glasses when she tells him that the cardiology clinic in Leningrad is on the fifth floor of a building with no elevator. “The doctor was right,” she adds, smiling. “If you made it to her office, you had a strong heart. There was nothing she could do.”

Is there anything that I could do? I have been living a life—teaching ESL classes, making soups, walking the dog—in which my mother, always there, in the basement of my house, has become little more than a parenthesis. In the morning I hear the exhaust fan go on in her bathroom; in the afternoon I hear a knife drumming on the cutting board as she chops vegetables for salad. Her Russian TV programs used to boom all the way up to the first floor, but when she began to lose her hearing, we bought her a pair of headphones, and now I barely hear her at all. As years pass, we talk less and less frequently, and when we do, it is about the most trivial things: dinners, television news, birthday cards from our Russian family.

Every year Dr. Klughaupt gives my mother a flu shot. “Everyone older than sixty should get one,” he says, and I believe him, as I believe everything he utters. For several years, before my mother became a U.S. citizen and eligible for Medicaid, he treated her for free.

But this fall the flu vaccine is in short supply, and even Dr. Klughaupt cannot help us. I try to explain to Mama that the shortage has to do with last year's insufficient orders by the government, but all she sees is what it means to her. There is a new anxiety in her eyes, a fear that for a whole year she is going to be at risk, vulnerable and unprotected, at the mercy of a freshly invigorated virus.

I call a local hospital that directs me to the community health services of Ridgewood. They say the few doses they received have already been assigned to newborns, the aged, and the sick. My mother is aged, I say to the woman on the other end of the phone line, who says in a practiced voice that she is truly sorry. She advises me to call the health services of the neighboring towns. You never know, she says, offering a sliver of hope; there may be a cancellation.

When I explain the sequence of my flu-related calls to her, Mama does not try to find a culprit or offer criticism of the vaccine-­related bureaucracy, as she would have in the past. She is in her new survival mode, which instructs her to keep things to herself, but I can see that she is worried. I try to reassure her, trotting out arguments that I know won't convince her. You're almost never in a crowd, I say, because you mostly stay home. You'll simply hibernate with a book, I joke, like a bear in a lair. She smiles, but I can see her smile is strained.

I call more hospitals and community service centers, and finally one says that a few days from now they will administer flu shots at a local church. If we arrive early, I am told, we may be able to get on the list of those lucky enough to get an injection. I tell Mama, and the news makes her beam.

We arrive early. I go up to the three administrative women and the male nurse who run the show. They take Mama's name and age and tell me to wait. We sit on a pew in the middle of the church and watch a panel in front of us call other names. They look omnipotent and authoritarian, like the presidium of the Central Committee in the Palace of Congresses we so often saw on television—only instead of a hammer and sickle there is a stained-glass cross hanging behind them.

Every ten minutes or so my mother looks at her watch and shakes her head in dismay, as if she were going to be late for an important appointment, a meeting she couldn't miss. Her frowning brow and the bitter look in her eyes betray fear and make me get up and walk to the pulpit, where they again tell me to wait.

Only a couple of years ago we sat like this, waiting, when Mama needed her passport renewed in the Russian Consulate on the Upper East Side in New York. On a January morning, after two hours' driving from New Jersey, inching along in rush-hour traffic, we elbowed our way through a thick crowd around the consulate's front door, eliciting glances of resentment because Mama held a World War II veteran's card that allowed her to enter without waiting on line. As we pushed through the human cordon besieging the consulate, I thought of an overnight line for Finnish boots at the main department store on Nevsky Prospekt, where a woman with henna hair or a man in dark blue trackpants brandished the list of those who had spent all night on the street and could now be allowed inside the store for a chance to own a pair of European footwear. Inside the consulate building, in the entranceway to the once exquisite brownstone with columns and complicated moldings, we joined another line. The consulate, it seemed, processed its expatriated citizens like an intestinal tract would process food: by holding them all in one small space to be marinated in frustration and discomfort, then—in a slow peristaltic movement—pushing the group into the next room, where nothing was going to be done, again.

“Sir,” I said in Russian to the official in a suit and tie who seemed in charge of the human peristalsis, “could a Russian war veteran please have a chair to sit down?” He winced and looked around, as if the word
sir
could not possibly refer to him, as if inside this Russian fortress in the middle of capitalist Manhattan they all still remained comrades. For the next two hours, as Mama sat waiting and I stood behind her chair like a guard, she glanced at her watch every few minutes just as she is doing now, and frowned when someone else's name was called.

We sit and wait inside the church until there are only a few people left, until finally our waiting pays off. They call Mama's name and we walk to the almighty flu presidium, where she rolls up her sleeve and gets a shot.

Outside, as we make our way to the car, I see that her face has softened and relaxed. We are both basking in the moment of release: the tension is over and the burden is off my back, at least for another year.

“I can't believe I got the vaccine,” Mama says, happily. Her shuffle seems to have vanished, and her steps are again in stride with mine. “What gods should I thank for this?” she asks, looking up into the pewter autumn sky, a nonbeliever who seems to have been transformed by two hours of sitting on a pew.

I am immune to pews, so my answer is, as usual, irreverent and selfish.

“Thank me,” I say.

I am in the basement of my Ridgewood house—Mama's apartment—emptying the washing machine and tossing wet clothes into the dryer. The laundry room is next to Mama's bathroom, and every week when I bring down a basket with dirty shirts and underwear, a smile rises to her lips. Our laundry gives her another chance to see me.

She is watching a figure-skating championship on a direct channel from Moscow. This is what used to occupy our evenings in Leningrad: we watched figure skating together. We knew the broadcasting times of every national, European, and world competition; we could both recite the name of every gold, silver, and bronze medal champion in the past five years. Granted, aside from
News from the Fields
and the
TV Travelers Club,
there was little else to watch on Soviet television. But figure skating was special. There was something poetic in those inhumanly high, effortless lifts, when the man glided on the ice with his arms raised and his partner slowly circled in the air above his head, hovering like a big, weightless bird, unensnared and untethered to the earth.

The skaters are all new now, and gliding over the ice in free flight is no longer sufficient to win. I linger to watch a couple crocheting a lace of steps on the ice in some European capital, dancing to a song from
West Side Story
. I wait to see their scores as they clump on their skates into the contestants' box and sit down next to their coach, a balding man with a Mediterranean mustache. Are they from Italy, I wonder, or maybe Bulgaria? The girl is still bursting with adrenaline after their dance, her arms flying as she tries to explain something to her coach. She rolls up the sleeves of her dress, and the camera freezes on a tattoo on her forearm, a starlike object with a ribbon of words we don't have a chance to read before the camera abandons them in favor of the scores that have just been posted.

“What a beautiful tattoo,” Mama says.

I register her words but do not know how to react to them. My mother, who has always worshiped uniformity and order—how could she possibly attach the word
beautiful
to a tattoo? She may think that living in the West has corrupted me into liking tattoos, and this may be her way of sidling up to me, of making me want to linger in the basement, to spend more time with her than I normally do. If I allow her to breach the wall I so assiduously erected after my father died, will I lose the self I have struggled to create?