Russian Tattoo (7 page)

“Just take the practice tests,” says Robert, unable to give me better advice. He stands in the middle of our living room, his hands in the pockets of his corduroy jeans. I don't know what he is really thinking. All I know is his calm tone does not reassure me.

I do the first test and get half of the answers wrong.

There is a wall calendar in Sagar's room, a countdown to his mother's visit. “Four weeks and three days,” he says and looks at the date circled in black Magic Marker, pushing his glasses up his nose as though to make sure he counted correctly. “I haven't told Roxana,” he adds. “I don't even know how to bring it up.”

“Tell her your mother is coming for a visit,” I suggest with a giggle. I know I shouldn't trivialize this with a giggle, but I imagine my mother arriving in Austin, carrying string bags of homemade
pirozhki
and cardboard boxes with samovars inside them, ready to advise me on a life she has never seen. “Roxana will be thrilled your mother is coming,” I say, trying to be convincing. “She'll envy you.”

Why is it, I wonder, that the mothers who are wanted can't make it here while those who aren't are hopping on the first plane? I know, of course, that the real torment for Sagar is not how to tell Roxana about his mother but how to tell his mother about Roxana. The mother who is coming all the way from India with a suitcase full of Kodak brides.

Eleven

I
hate working in the pizzeria,” I say to Robert. “I forget about slices in the oven, I can't understand what people are asking for. I don't even like pizza anymore.”

But what I hate most is the feeling of worthlessness. “It makes me sick,” I say. “Going there every day, moving the tables out, then rolling them back in. Having to pretend that I'm someone I don't even know.”

Robert takes off his glasses and starts rubbing the lenses with his shirt.

“Back in my insane Motherland,” I say, “waiters waited and teachers taught. Everything was permanent, everything made sense. If you moved tables, you knew nothing about books or theater. If you punched out cash register receipts, you thought that Pasternak was an herb.”

“But you know about theater and books.” Robert's voice is now louder and higher. “You're not in Soviet Russia anymore.” He is logical, as usual. “You know who you are.”

Do all Americans know who they are? Maybe in this country people are born with an inherent knowledge about themselves as individuals—not as part of various collectives—an identity that doesn't get incinerated, as they grow up, by the rays of the bright future no one is promised here.

“Look, this is only temporary,” says Robert. “Here are the numbers: in August I had a thousand dollars in my bank account; now I'm down to one seventy-five.”

“Maybe I can do translations,” I say. “Does anyone in Austin need anything translated into Russian?” For a moment, the idea seems to make sense and I look at Robert with hope, but he doesn't say anything and I know the answer even before he shrugs and shakes his head.

“Russian lessons?” I ask, but he still sits silently, frowning.

If I were as open and unafraid as my actress sister, I would tell Robert that life here rushes at me like a flood of indecipherable information, a constant pitch of senseless noise, a cruel language-­immersion program with no trace of human teachers. I would tell him to break out of his self-absorption—his black holes, his violin, his science fiction—and show me how to buy a pair of shoes without humiliating myself. But I am not my actress sister.

Instead, I say something meaningless. “I found a dollar on the sidewalk this morning,” I mumble and pull a crumpled bill out of my pocket.

“Lucky you,” says Robert and sighs.

I am in a university auditorium taking the GRE test. We sit at single desks with pencils hovering over the multiple-choice question booklet. I read paragraphs I don't understand; I fill the little circles of the answers as I'm required. When the proctor warns us we have five minutes left, I realize I am still three pages away from the end of section one.

When I first fell in love with English, it was the middle of July in Leningrad, the summer I was ten and my father lay in bed at home, watching soccer on television, his skin shrink-wrapped around his bones. Every weekday, in my tutor's apartment, I heard the musical sounds of English and memorized words and grammar to pass an entrance exam to a special school that would continue to teach me this mysterious language. But now—when I thought I'd learned it—I can't find a trace of magic in the five answers to each question the GRE booklet offers.

The math part is easier, although I still don't understand why I need to figure out the unknowns in algebra equations and calculate perimeters of triangles to apply to graduate school to study literature. I don't understand why, instead of solving each problem and posting the correct answer, we need to be distracted by four erroneous choices. And I don't know how all this—whether I get into the Austin graduate program or don't—is going to affect my life. Instead of calculating the length of the hypotenuse in front of me, I am swarmed by more pressing questions that keep buzzing in my head: Will Robert ever be able to see beyond himself and notice that I am failing? Will Sagar yield to his mother and marry one of her Kodak brides, breaking Roxana's heart and probably his own? Will I learn to say
I
instead of
we
?

And most important: What will happen to Robert and me?

Our room has a table with two chairs, a fan that creaks from side to side as it sends air swirling across the linoleum up to the window with a view of a fenced patch of brown grass, and a mattress. Robert says he doesn't need a bed; beds are nice but superfluous since one can sleep just as well on the floor. The only time I ever slept on the ground was my summer stay at the Crimean beach. Even in our crumbling dacha with no indoor toilet and no running water, where flies buzzed around the veranda until they got entangled in spiderwebs, everyone had a bed.

My shelf in the closet holds two tops Marina crocheted for me, green and purple, a sundress, and a long skirt she sewed from left-over patches of cotton. Last week, I wore the skirt on Halloween because Robert said it was a perfect Gypsy costume. The rest of my shelf holds a pair of Levi's corduroys, a present from a student in the American class I taught at Leningrad University, the only piece of clothing that was worth lugging across the Atlantic. My wardrobe is completed by a T-shirt with the university logo that Roxana gave me soon after she first came to the house with Sagar. I like the T-shirt's soft, light cotton, so I wear it a lot, sometimes for three days in a row. This morning Robert gave me a questioning look before he left for school. “Can you put on something else?” he asked. “You can't wear the same thing over and over again.”

There was no point telling Robert that this was a habit from home: we wore the same shirt several days in a row because we owned only two shirts.

“How did it go at the pizza place today?” asks Robert when I get home after another day at Milto's. From his voice and his posture I know he isn't really interested in hearing the answer. He sits on the sofa cross-legged, watching his foot suspended over the linoleum.

I sit down next to him, the smell of the pizza oven rising from my clothes.

“I think it would be better if you go back to New Jersey and live at my mother's for a while,” says Robert and leans forward to rub an imaginary speck of dust off his shoe.

The words hang in the air, refusing to enter my brain. Live at his mother's for a while, I repeat in my mind, making sure that I heard him correctly. What does this mean, living at his mother's, and how long is a while, I want to ask, but the whole statement is so sudden that I don't.

“I don't know what else I can do,” he says, his voice thin with lack of promise. “You seem to hate everything here.”

I am not sure I hate everything. I don't hate Sagar and Roxana, and even, strangely, I don't hate Sagar's mother, who is probably now already making lists and buying presents for her upcoming transoceanic trip. I don't hate the early morning light that slants through our window and paints straight amber lines on the linoleum. I don't hate our reading Chekhov together, even though there is little hope Robert will ever fully understand the meaning of
toska
.

But what reaches my ears—instead of what he said about my seeming to hate everything here—is that he seems to hate my being here. Something that fits in with Robert's apparent disappointment in me, with his unenthusiastic tone and his immediate fascination with his shoes. Something that I've suspected all along.

“You hate your job, you hate the weather, you even hate my mattress,” Robert says. “You never sound happy. All you do is complain that you hate everything around here. Sometimes I even think you hate me.”

“I don't hate everything,” I say, but the stress falls on the last word, making the statement as wobbly and pathetic as my GRE test strategies or my Milto's pizza-making skills.

“I told you back in Leningrad I'm not ready for this. For living together like this.” His voice is higher, unfamiliar, and at the same time resigned, as if he were delivering a lecture to one of his freshman classes. “I'm used to living alone. We talked about this; I never wanted to get married.”

I remember the moment in Leningrad: minus twenty-five, three-foot-long icicles hanging off the roof like pointed missiles, the two of us shuffling forward in small, careful steps on the icy sidewalk. I remember his words. I remember Karen's name mentioned: he wanted to continue seeing other women. “I understand,” I said back then, although I really didn't. I even added a mousy “thank you” that puffed out of my mouth and hung between us in a little cloud of frost.

“You're right, you did tell me,” I say. “I actually like certain things here,” I add, but the words come out limp and unconvincing because I know that it's already too late to alter the shape of what's going to happen.

“You'll be better off there, in New Jersey,” says Robert. “Just until the end of the semester. You'll stay with Millie; she wants you to come. And then we'll see.”

I don't know what there is to see, but I nod. I accept his offer to ship me off to his mother the same way I agreed to his marriage proposal. There isn't much to argue about here, the same way there wasn't much to debate back then. I was stuck inside the boundaries of the Soviet ruin, hermetically sealed from the rest of the world, with my mother ordering me to eat cabbage soup and be home by ten, just as I'm stuck here in Texas, walking to Milto's Pizzeria in sneakers I couldn't pay for, wasting time on the floor in front of a fan, watching horror movies while Robert sits at the university with Karen.

I nod, although going to live with Robert's mother doesn't feel like an offer of help. It feels like a dismissal, and I steel myself against his words—against his razor-sharp solution—so that I don't get unhinged and curl into a ball right here, in front of my first coffee table. I try to be all reason and acceptance, but inside, I crawl into the darkest corner of my soul to hide from my profound failure that doesn't seem to have a cure, the failure that requires my immediate ouster to New Jersey.

“Okay,” I say, another new word I learned recently, a convenient word that most of the time means nothing, but once in a while—when pronounced with a frontal “eh” at the end that refuses to hide in the back of the mouth—can break out of its worn-out mold and revert to the meaning of constrained agreement. I agree, but inside me everything is aching and churning with anger. “Okay,” I utter, trying to keep my voice steady. I'll go to New Jersey and stay with Millie. And then we'll see.