Russian Tattoo (3 page)

Of course, my mother, who is hard to fool, quickly figured out her own truth. “Nelka taught you to hate it on purpose. She skimmed it off and ate it herself,” my mother said, her fists on her hips. “You can't trust those know-nothing plumbers' offspring,” she added. “You have to watch their every step.”

I didn't remember Nelka ever eating the skimmed-off skin, so I couldn't argue with my mother about my nanny's milk transgressions, as I normally would have. My mother has always been suspicious of other people's intentions, always weary of all those
chuzhoi,
those not part of the family. There were only so many soup bones, or beets, or bottles of milk to go around, and if you didn't make sure that your own,
svoi,
had hoarded enough for today and tomorrow, you might as well skim the top off every pot of milk and serve it to every Nelka on a silver platter.

“When I was little, my mother had a
domrabotnitsa,
” I say to Robert. “She didn't like her much.”

He looks at me quizzically, and I realize he has never heard the word.

“
Domrabotnitsa
means a domestic worker, the feminine form. You know that nouns have a gender, right?” I ask as he nods, annoyed that I am questioning his knowledge of such basic grammar. “It's always the feminine form,” I say, giving him a little Russian lesson, trying to make myself useful beyond reducing the supplies of cream cheese and ketchup in Millie's kitchen.

“
Domrabotnitsa,”
Robert repeats, and I know he has filed the word into his brain. “When we get to Texas, you must give me some more lessons.”

“Sure,” I say, although I am not sure at all, because I think of other lessons he may get from Karen the Russian professor, the woman in Austin who is keeping the door of this marriage open.

Four

I
sit on the floor in front of a fan in Austin, Texas. It is the end of August, the hottest August people around here say they remember, and the house where we live has no air-conditioning. Robert and I flew here last week from New Jersey, my first flight on an American airline, where smiling flight attendants walked around the cabin, offering drinks and serving salad topped with raw mushrooms. Two weeks earlier, I came from the mushroom capital of the world, our dacha thirty kilometers away from Leningrad, where everyone knew that mushrooms must always be cooked. I stared at the tray in front of me, white mushroom slices glaring up from the bowl, menacing in their rawness. No one else seemed alarmed at the prospect of sudden death. A passenger across the aisle leisurely poked at his salad with a plastic fork, and Robert was busy tearing a corner off the small rectangle of oil, ready to pour it onto his mound of poison.

“Can you really eat mushrooms uncooked?” I whispered, not to alarm the other passengers.

Robert turned his head, his stare revealing that my question made no sense to him. “Why not?” he said, shrugging. It was a dismissive shrug, unworthy of someone who had been to our stores and eaten at the Leningrad University cafeteria, with its smells of steamed cabbage and burned sunflower oil, someone who said he understood Russia. But Robert was home now, back in the land of smiling salesclerks and strawberries in December.

I thought—with a sudden sadness—of all those baskets full of wild mushrooms Marina, my mother, and I used to bring from the woods to our dacha every August and September. We would lay the mushrooms out on newspaper spread all over the kitchen floor: the best chocolate brown caps to be sautéed with sour cream or hung over the stove to dry for the winter, long-legged gray caps with slimy tops to use in soups, and purplish second-rate mushrooms with wheel spokes under their caps, only good for salting. Everyone—even the worst hooligan and failing
dvoechnik
in my school—knew you couldn't eat any of them raw.

I turned around to look at the doomed planeload of people, unconcerned about the hazards speared onto the tines of their forks. They were cheerfully thumbing through newspapers and books, chatting. A stewardess was already clearing trays from the front rows, where not a single person was doubled over with pain or beginning to spasm with convulsions. Everyone was still alive.

I poked at the shreds of salad leaves, aiming my fork between the mushroom slices. It was obvious everyone around me knew something I didn't, something they probably learned along with their first letters of the English alphabet. They were all privy to the knowledge that these mushrooms were altogether different—perhaps artificially grown in a hothouse or manufactured in a factory from capitalist synthetics. The only one who didn't know this was me.

But there was another, more depressing truth staring back at me from the bowl with raw mushrooms. I realized that what may have seemed interesting to Robert in Russia—my exotic ignorance—was now silly and annoying, a liability rather than a charm.

Every day, Robert goes to the university, where he researches black holes and teaches math to freshmen. I stay in the house we share with a roommate and sit in front of a fan. Our roommate, Sagar, is in Robert's PhD program, and they leave the house together in Sagar's little Volkswagen when their teaching schedules coincide. Sagar is Indian, born in Bombay, and this makes me think of a typewritten yoga manual I borrowed, when I was eighteen, from tall, blond Anton, who designed posters at the Leningrad House of Friendship and Peace, where I was a secretary. For two years after I met him, I practiced yoga poses in our apartment on a rug in front of an armoire, thinking that I was intrigued by Eastern philosophy and its connection between mind and body, while I was really intrigued by Anton. Dreaming of mastering all the asanas, I imagined traveling to India with him to get close to the yoga teachings and, I hoped, to Anton himself. When I announced I was no longer eating meat, my mother launched into a story of standing on an hour-long line for a stick of bologna—after six hours of teaching anatomy—which was supposed to make me feel guilty for rejecting such a hard-earned offering. For two years I ignored her calls for sanity, picking gristle out of my cabbage soup, until one morning, passing my desk, Anton casually told me that he was leaving for a Crimean vacation with his new friend Raisa. “But what about the yoga?” I wanted to ask, as the air in the room seemed to have turned to lead. Anton, oblivious to my mute question, waved and muttered “so long” while I sat there with my spine stiff and my mouth open, a pose for which my yoga manual had yet to find a name.

Sagar doesn't resemble Anton in any way. He is not tall or blond, and he wears glasses that often slide to the middle of his nose. He speaks with an intonation that rises and falls like the little ripples of ocean surf, and his consonants are all soft, like the fine sand underneath. I don't know if he is interested in yoga or if he eats meat. Except for a bowl of cereal in the morning, he and Robert eat at the university, between their freshman math classes and whatever else they do to advance cosmic research. There, at the university, in addition to the research, Robert writes science fiction books and takes Russian lessons from Karen, whose name he hasn't mentioned even once.

Yesterday Sagar showed me photographs spilling out of an envelope covered with colorful Indian stamps that had arrived in the mail earlier that day. Young women with red dots on their foreheads, serious and coquettish, with deep black eyes, wearing gold-threaded saris, stared from the pictures as if in a beauty contest, waiting to be judged.

“It's my mother,” said Sagar. “She has nothing better to do. She sits in her house, trying to find me a wife.”

“Really?” I said. I couldn't believe that there were still marriages arranged by parents at the end of the twentieth century, as I couldn't believe that Sagar's mother had managed to occupy a greater area of control than mine.

“She wants me to marry an Indian girl from a good family,” said Sagar and smirked. “She thinks I'll be more comfortable with one of our own.”

“That's what my mother wanted me to do,” I said. “Marry a Russian boy, a nice university graduate. Our own.”
Svoi
.

“I'm already too spoiled for one of my own,” said Sagar. “My life has moved on, I'm too Western. I wouldn't know what I'd do with any of these girls.”

I wondered if Sagar was a bit too cavalier dismissing his Indian-­ness, pegging himself so unquestionably into a Western lifestyle. But maybe he wasn't. Maybe, in his years of graduate school, he had already gone through whatever it takes to become American, his brain cells boasting new strings of DNA that didn't relate to women wrapped in saris. Maybe I should ask him for a lesson or two.

“My mother's going to be crushed,” he said and shook his head. His glasses sat in the middle of his nose, and his eyes above them glistened with sadness.

“Look at this one,” I said, lifting a picture out of the beauty pageant display. “She's ravishing.” I turned the picture over and read what was written on the other side. “ ‘Dipti Kumar. Graduating from Oxford in May.' Graduating from Oxford! You wouldn't know what to do with
her
?”

“You sound like my mother,” said Sagar, and it just then hit me that I probably did. Even worse, I sounded like
my
mother, and—because I simultaneously missed and resented my mother—the thought irked me and also made me grin.

In the afternoon I walk to the supermarket, where it is cool, and stare at the endless shelves that climb all the way to the ceiling, parading an infinite number of different brands of frozen pizza, pasta sauce, and flavored yogurts I never knew existed. I have always lived with my family, so I never had to shop for food, or cook, or stretch ten rubles until payday to make five more meals. Back in Leningrad, there was always a pot of something waiting under a pot warmer Marina had sewn from the remnants of cotton she'd collected over the years of making clothes. The pot warmer was made to look like a chicken, with a head and body stuffed with old rags, and underneath I always found sour cabbage soup, or macaroni with ground beef, or grated carrots stewed in tomato sauce, waiting patiently for me to remove the lid and scoop up whatever was there onto a plate my mother had left on the kitchen table, a spoon and fork next to it. Dinners in my kitchen had always been there, like water gurgling out of the faucet, like heat hissing through the radiators under the windows. They were simply a part of life, and it never occurred to me, in the twenty-four years I lived there, to think of where they came from.

Without my mother and sister, the job of shopping and cooking falls on me. I creep past shelves of cut-up beef and pork and poultry sheathed in plastic, feeling I am inside the aquarium again, gazing at the real life through the glass. All that meat—chopped in pieces for your convenience, big and small, displayed on plastic trays called Styrofoam, for soup, or stew, or other recipes I don't know how to make. It was easier to shop in Leningrad: lines always led to food available at the moment, eliminating the necessity of making a choice.

Among all these packages one attracts my attention. It looks like what I once saw under a glass display in Leningrad, although this meat is neatly arranged under plastic, fat and bones removed, rather than tossed onto a bloody sheet of paper hanging off a butcher's scale. It looks luxuriously expensive, although it isn't—something you would normally see at a special Party store if you were a high-ranking official with a pass to get in. I don't know what I am going to do with this hunk of meat, but it looks familiar, so I buy it.

Back in the house, Robert looks at the package I brought. “What is this?” he asks, regarding the meat from above his glasses. “It's chuck or something . . .” he says, wrinkling his nose.

I am not sure if I should feel guilty for not knowing what to buy or if I should tell Robert that at a supermarket the size of the Hermitage I was lucky to have found the meat section at all. Or maybe I should muster up some courage and announce that chuck, whatever it is, was precisely what I had in mind. Should I have asked Robert what he wanted from the supermarket, what he wanted for dinner tonight? Is this what married people—or those pretending to be married—do?

Yet it is clear that Robert saw right to the core of the matter: I have no idea what to do with this meat. I am as inept a shopper as I am a cook—and this might as well be burnt into my forehead. I bought something alien and awful, something only ignorant immigrants could try to turn into a meal in the twilight of their basements.

“What was I supposed to buy?” I ask.

“Minute steak,” he says.

At first I'm not sure I heard him right. I'm not sure if he said “minute” or “mini steak.” I don't know if he wants a tiny piece of steak or steak that is somehow connected to the clock. The truth, as my mother warned me, is staring me in the face: I've always been
egoistka
, always busy typing banned poetry through four sheets of carbon paper—so that five friends could read books my country wouldn't sanction—instead of learning how to keep house and make
blini
.

I wish Robert, instead of telling me what I should have bought, had gone to the supermarket with me to shed light on all those mysterious cuts of meat. I wish he could tell me about the exhibits in the supermarket Hermitage and the department store Hermitage, the way Nina taught him about Russian verbs, the way I showed him Leningrad courtyards. I wish he would stop practicing his violin, descend from his university lectern, and look at me the same way he used to look at me in Leningrad.