Perhaps someone was only faking sleep? That babushka in the
fedora, maybe? Playing tricks with strings and mirrors? “
What do
you mean, Citizenka, harassing strangers like this?
” Stalina said in
a louder voice.
“‘
Citizenka’ — ha! I am the Russian Soul, the firebird in the
hearts of all Russians whose hearts still beat
.” It was a hallucination,
then. That made sense. She hadn’t had anything to drink since some
brown water from the train station’s sink at one that afternoon.
“How quickly time alights from our grasp.”
The lisp seemed
to be coming from her purse, but that was impossible, although,
if she were Osip, she would open the purse to make sure the KGB
hadn’t planted a radio bomb. The voice began to recite Karamzin.
Stalina opened the purse. Of course, there was nothing new inside: a
comb, their visas, the sixty-seven American dollars of their savings
they had been allowed to wrest from the Great Mother’s fist, and a
piece of lace she’d taken from her wedding dress at the last minute,
a lapse into sentimentality, which was already turning dingy. Stalina
threw the lace in the window ashtray. The voice continued to
declaim: “
Gloomy nature captures your gentle glance
/
It is as if she
mourns along with you.
” Only now, it seemed to be coming from
the ashtray, where the rag was moving — not moving on its own, of
course, just being joggled by the motion of the train. Stalina would
sleep. If, that is, she wasn’t already sleeping. “
Bid farewell to the
birches, whispering of our ancestors, how their swords gleamed in
the moonlight, how their horses’ hooves would echo —
”
Whispering, so her sleeping husband and daughters wouldn’t
hear, Stalina said, “
On their way to pogrom my grandmother?
” With
an effort, she restrained herself from further speech: they hadn’t yet
reached the border of the Capacious and Mighty shit-swamp, and
also the voice was a dream. In frustration, she tried to pull apart
the lace. It felt terrible to do that, almost as if she were betraying
Osya…but he always said he didn’t care what she wore, as long as
she eventually took it off. When he slept, he sometimes looked like a
boy, and sometimes, like his grandmother Rufa. Tonight, exhausted,
he looked just like Rufa. He stirred irritably at the sound of the lace
tearing and muttered something about suspecting the cigarettes.
The lace rose from the ashtray and somehow reconstituted
itself into an embroidered ladies’ handkerchief of the kind Stalina’s
great-aunt had brought to funerals, and, upon returning, had opened,
to show the family the damp evidence of her suffering. This
handkerchief, perhaps a cousin of the great-aunt’s, asked whether
there were any succor Stalina might offer to ease the suffering of her
fellow exiles. Mightn’t she lead them in a song of comfort?
Little
Grey Wolf
, perhaps? Stalina tried and tried to sleep, and finally slept,
and it was wonderful, but when she awoke in the daylight, so did the
handkerchief.
Ever since that night, Stalina could not think quietly for more
than ten minutes without the Russian Soul romanticizing, moralizing,
and, worst of all, attempting to awaken nostalgia for
La Belle Russie
,
as if Stalina had ever lived in such a place. People called her hard and
irritable, but it was the soul that had made her so. Now, she threw
off the satin blanket, which looked better than it felt. Osya snored
amiably beside her, also on his stomach, underneath the sheet (long
ago they had agreed to split bed coverings thus), his face turned
towards her, puffing clouds of innocently sour breath.
“
If only you had remained true to the Motherland, she would
have already brought forth a gallant groom for your daughter,
” the
soul said.
“
Listen, napkin, we’re never going back to those anti-Semites,
hear?
” Stalina said.
But. If they were in Boston…Boston: the most European of
all American cities, the center of Russian immigrant
intelligentsia
,
home to Harvard and MIT, imagine the kinds of suitors for her
daughters’ hands.
Also, Stalina’s mother, in a fit of senile willfulness, had relocated
herself from Stamford to Boston the previous year. Now she was
hosting
vecherinkas
every night: pensioners drinking, smoking,
singing, and at times dancing to old Komsomol songs. If she were in
Boston, Stalina could monitor these activities.
And Edward Nudel kept offering her a job in his Cambridge
lab, paying more than twice what she now earned. So many
hipovi
Boston boutiques she’d be able to afford — she’d really teach her
daughters how to dress then.
But Stalina had had a romance with Edward before meeting
Osip, if by “romance,” one meant an affair with a stooped, finicky,
married and frustrated biochemist, an affair as interminable and
depressing as the post-Khrushchev era in which it had occurred, and
Osip was jealous. You’re standing in the way of your daughters’
future happiness, she silently accused the hump.
“
How dare you slander your lord and protector?
” The
handkerchief was guarding her virtue again. Stalina wouldn’t even
bother to reply. She would go to sleep like a serious person.
She took deep breaths. What would be a nice school outfit for
Katya? American children had no idea how lucky they were not to
have to wear brown dresses every day. Katya would look her best in
purple — a sweater? A jumpsuit?
Stalina turned, and turned again, like a body turning under a
car. What kind of person is so morbid? she would have asked her
daughters, if one of them had thought it.
Stalina’s family had been afraid, which had not been remarkable
given the time and place. What was remarkable was the means they
undertook to remove their reasons for fear. “
Surely, Stalin would
never arrest anyone named after himself. This name will be good for
our entire family — if anyone ever questions us, we’ll just say, ‘Me?
I love Stalin so much I named my daughter after him.
’”
Despite this and other precautions, Stalina’s father, a chemist
specializing in sugar, had been fired from his job the year she started
first grade. She hadn’t been able to understand exactly why. Her
first thought had been that perhaps he had been stealing the sugar:
it was what she would have done, but it was not that. People wrote
newspaper articles calling him a Cosmopolitan, but he was really an
Internationalist, which was much better, her mother said. (Stalina
wanted to bring these two advanced words in to her teacher, but her
mother looked about to slap her when she voiced this gold-medal
idea.)
“
Chemistry belongs to all nations,
” was the mock-pompous,
hopeful sentence her father intoned at dinner, raising his glass of
homemade dandelion wine, before getting on the train to Moscow,
where he was going to speak to the boy who used to share a desk
with him at school and was now a high-ranking official.
His old seatmate refused to see him. On his way back to the
train station, he was hit by a bus. When he got out of the hospital, he
couldn’t remember anything: not his reasons for going to Moscow,
not the risk he now ran of being arrested, not the names of the co-
workers and friends who never came to see him. That job was left
to Stalina’s mother, who whispered, “
He doesn’t even know to aim
at the toilet anymore,
” and, “
He went out into the street yesterday,
no underpants,
” and “
He called me a dirty devil.
” He died in the
hospital, screaming for his father to come and defend him from the
hooligani
, the
pogromschiki
, the nurses, the pigeons.
A few years later, Khrushchev made his secret speech and the
children at school began to make fun of Stalina’s name. “
Foreigner.
”
“
I am not.
” “
You’re foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, aren’t
you?
”
Her mother said, “
Just go by Lina, there are lots of Linas.
”
Stalina refused. Stalin had been evil, but she couldn’t fault his
choice of a name. He’d renamed himself “steel,” and then he’d taken
over the Comintern. The name was something to be reckoned with.
And now, here was her husband, right next to her, a nice solid
man, and there was her Russia, across the world, years in the past.
There was their television, right in their bedroom, there was her
Cubist figurine from the Boston Museum, luxuries unimaginable,
and three daughters, almost all grown, none knowing how to fix a
button or a bribe, nor needing to know.
How Milla had behaved tonight! She’d have to talk to her about
how an educated young woman conducts herself in polite society,
speaks with young men, grooms her eyebrows, serves the people
sitting around her, memorizes anecdotes.…The handkerchief
agreed, and added other suggestions of lessons, and with this long
and satisfying list, Stalina finally soothed herself to sleep.