EVERY YEAR, DURING SCHOOL recess in November, my mother takes me to her medical institute, where she teaches in the department of human anatomy, and I spend ten days in the museum. She is trying to indoctrinate me early into the serious world of medicine because she doesn’t want me to become an actress like my sister. The museum is silent and empty and, like the rest of the human anatomy department, stinks of formaldehyde.
I breathe in, and the thick chemical air fills my lungs. A diagram of the lungs, with blue and red vessels tangled up inside a faceless man’s chest, hangs on the left wall. Below, in a large jar of cloudy liquid, floats a pair of real lungs, like gray, deflated chunks of rubber, a Latin caption underneath. I walk around the room gazing at the exhibits. Half a head stands in a jar with the nasal passages revealed, the gray hemispheres of the brain cracked like parched earth. What thoughts, I wonder, lived in the grooves of its caverns? In another jar floats a heart, colorless and limp, with stumps of arteries suspended in the liquid—a misshapen pear.
Flaps of skin, naked muscles, wrinkled genitals—nothing is frightening. They are all transformed, bloodless, dissociated from the life they are supposed to represent. Grainy and monochromatic, parts of human bodies float in jars like images behind the thick glass of TV screens.
During these anatomy visits, my mother places me in the care of a lab assistant, Aunt Klava, a shriveled babushka with clumps of gray hair bursting from under a white hat. Everyone here wears a white doctor’s coat and a cloth hat, even lab assistants, even first-year students who silently creep into the museum and carefully pull their chairs away from desks with exhibits, hesitating to sit close to the jars with formaldehyde.
Aunt Klava smells of tobacco, and when I hang out in the hallway, I see her puffing on a cigarette on a stair landing, near the toilet. She shuffles, and wheezes, and clangs keys. She fishes into her pocket and pulls out three pieces of sucking candy—for me, for stringy-haired Zina, who busily peers into a microscope every time someone opens the door into her small lab in the basement, and for Volodya, who works in the morgue and who clumps along the hallway in a rubber apron and big rubber boots. Zina and Volodya are eighteen, straight out of school, but the six years that separate us are light-years. They acknowledge my presence, but they look right past me. They are adults, they work for a living, and they know things I don’t know.
MY MOTHER’S STUDENTS ARE starting their practicum: they will be learning dissection. Volodya and another morgue assistant, Dima, in rubber aprons and gloves, carry a cadaver up from the morgue in the basement and lay it on a high marble table in the dissection room. The body is brown from formaldehyde, as far beyond life as the museum organs. As my mother begins her class, I slink closer and see that it is a man. I gaze at the limbs stretched along the torso, at the angular face with skin tight around the cheekbones, at the stomach sunken under the rib cage. At the lump of shriveled flesh in the crotch.
My mother looks up and tells me to go to the museum. Although I want to watch the dissection, I know I cannot argue with her in the middle of the class. Instead of the museum, I go down to the basement and walk along the narrow corridor, past the closed door to Zina’s lab, past the opened door to the morgue. The inside of the morgue is shrouded in twilight, two bulbs throwing dim light on huge tubs with wooden lids where bodies are kept. These are the bodies of people who have no relatives, whom nobody wants, my mother told me. The lids are connected to hand cranks by thick wire cords, frayed and discolored. The smell of formaldehyde is so intense here that it burns my nose and makes me cough.
In the corner, I see Zina, the lab assistant, sitting on a tub lid and Volodya pouring tea out of a kettle into her cup. They don’t see me, or pretend not to, engrossed in their tea break among the cadavers. I would like to sit with them, quietly, preferably next to Volodya, eavesdropping on their freshly acquired adult wisdom, but they continue to be oblivious to my presence. I pretend I am Zina, sitting on the wooden tub lid next to Volodya, talking matter-of-factly about mysterious grown-up things, glancing in the direction of the door, where a clumsy twelve-year-old with big feet is pathetically vying for his attention.
I go back to the dissection room and lurk in the doorway. My mother’s students are cautiously poking at the Man’s forearm with their scalpels, prodding his flesh in pursuit of the inner tubes of vessels, threads of nerves, clumps of muscle tissue. Even from where I stand I can see that the students are tentative, awed by their own audacity, by my mother’s confidence. Under her steady fingers, the Man’s body is slowly shrinking, cut up into museum exhibits spread around in petri dishes. I realize that the Man is disappearing at the rate of my mother’s lesson plans from an anatomy textbook, a chapter a day.
I SIT IN THE museum, drawing a big diagram of blood vessels my mother asked me to copy from a textbook. My desk is under the jars marked “Female Reproductive System.” Red arteries and blue veins crisscross their way from the heart to the perimeter of the skin. Red—fresh blood, full of oxygen; blue—old and used, on its way back to the filter of the heart. I must be careful and precise: one centimeter off, and the exact clock of the internal mechanism will creak to a stop and collapse. I am in charge of the organism’s complex wiring, of its smooth operation.
I think of a man I’d seen hanging around our dacha, a tall, dark man who approached me this summer at the bus stop while I was waiting for my mother to come back from work. I had seen him cutting grass in the field by the fringe of the forest, his movements broad and fierce as his scythe fell and whistled with a hypnotic rhythm. He was sitting in the grass, by the paved patch of the field where the bus ended its route, smoking and watching me with his hard, black eyes. I felt flattered that he was looking at me, a twelve-year-old in a homemade sundress, as if I were worthy of this attention, as if I were one of those older girls who painted their eyelids and teased their hair and went to dances on Saturday nights.
A dot at the end of the road grew into a bus, coughing and rattling, but even before it stopped, I knew my mother wasn’t on it. The three people on the bus climbed down the steps and started walking away, one toward the electric train station, the other two in the direction where the Gypsies lived. The air was grainy with gathering dusk, although it wasn’t even six. The bus waited a few minutes, screeched around in a plume of exhaust, and drove away. The man got up. He was wearing black pants and a checkered shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I needed to occupy myself with something, so I squatted near where the asphalt ended and grass began, pretending to study a patch of podorozhnik, a medicinal plant commonly known to stop bleeding. It had thick, dark-green leaves that were heart-shaped and veined.
From the corner of my eye I saw the man stretch, walk a few paces the width of the road, and stop, gazing in the direction of the forest as if estimating how long it would take him to get there. I kept sitting on my haunches, hesitant to move now that he was so directly in my field of vision, although the pose was uncomfortable and I could feel tiny needles of numbing pain beginning to tingle in my leg. Then I saw him look directly at me, and I quickly turned away and stared hard at the thick, dusty leaves.
“What is it you’re looking at?” he asked from about six feet away, his hands in his pockets. He used an informal ty for “you,” a form used with children or people you are on close terms with, and I wasn’t sure which one he meant.
I got up, my left leg asleep, but I clenched my teeth and didn’t show it hurt. “Podorozhnik,” I said, nodding toward the plant. Not looking at the man directly, I could still see him, big and powerful, gazing at me, making me feel important and almost grown-up.
“Do you want to take a walk in the field with me?” he asked, tilting his head toward the forest.
I knew it was an adult offer, not usually proffered to a twelve-year-old, and I felt grateful for his attention. I felt I’d been chosen, and it made my heart beat fast and hard. Too bad there was no one around, no one to see me walking with this handsome man. He stood there waiting, now smiling a little, his eyes crinkled, and that made him even more attractive. But then something tightened inside me. There appeared a strange expression in his eyes, making his gaze oily and uncomfortable, as if he could see something in me I didn’t know about, something shameful and illicit my father would’ve hated.
I didn’t want to offend him, but something made me shake my head and step back. He stopped smiling. I turned and started walking toward our house, although I knew that twenty minutes later, when my mother arrived, there would be no one there to meet her. I could sense the man’s eyes on my back, and his stare made me feel sordid, as if I’d done something I could never tell anyone about, something that must be wrapped up tightly and hidden out of sight, on the lowest shelf of my heart.
THEY ALL KNOW SOMETHING I don’t—my sister, handsome Volodya who works in the morgue, Zina the lab assistant who giggles when she is around him, and all those people on the streets and buses, elbowing each other on their way to work. They are all privy to a secret, deep and disgraceful, a secret they don’t talk about. It is only revealed in slanted glances and smirks, in a raised shoulder, in a bitten lip.
There is nowhere I can find out what this secret is about. Some of the girls from my grade behave as if they know what it is, as if they belong to this club of wisdom and experience. They stretch their mouths in all-knowing smiles or narrow their eyes in little smirks, but I have my suspicions. My friend Masha, for example, the girl whom I see less and less frequently although she lives in my courtyard, announced recently that when blood begins to trickle down your thighs, you must pull on long underwear with rubber bands above your knees to catch it before it falls to the ground. Masha said this with the utmost confidence, throwing back her head with perfectly cut hair to underscore her scholarship; yet I knew she was even more ignorant than I. The rubber-banded underwear seemed just as efficient a measure as the instruction of our civil defense teacher to hide under our desks if America hit us with an atomic bomb.
I try to find the answer in books. Not in Russian books, because they all avoid talking about the secret. Indecent and shameful, it is consigned entirely to the books of the rotting capitalist West. In my English literature class we are reading A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel, which exposes the ulcers of capitalism, but in a socialist, sterile way. I leaf through the collected works of Guy de Maupassant because a girl in my school, one of those who pretend they are in the know, said there is racy stuff in his books. I skim through the pages in search of the raunchy, but find nothing more than two people sleeping in one bed.
Then help seems to come from the most unlikely place. My school is taking us to see an American film called Men in Her Life. I am so excited I can hardly wait for the day, a week away. Men in her life—what can be more straightforward and titillating? I imagine a string of American men, all debonair and provocative, fighting for one woman, who is, without doubt, privy to all the facets of life. But when the lights in the theater turn off and grainy black-and-white images appear on the screen, the men of the title do nothing but walk around in white shirts with smoking jackets and bow ties and speak in long, undecipherable harangues of American English. What’s even more disappointing is that there are only two of them. They look alike, bony and unsmiling, and from the little I can understand, they seem to appear in the woman’s life successively rather than concurrently. The film drags on for two hours, and I cannot sneak out early because our teacher is sitting in my row. When the lights finally come on, I am exhausted from understanding so little English and disheartened because the knowledge was denied, again.
WHEN MY MOTHER AND I return from the anatomy department, we bring the formaldehyde smell back home, where it lingers in the hallway, around our coats and shoes.
“Where do babies come from?” I say casually as she is thrashing around the kitchen, throwing together a quick dinner. I watch her grab a piece of meat out of the refrigerator and force it down the throat of a meat grinder. A few vigorous cranks of the metal handle, and the face of the meat grinder erupts in red twists squeezing out into a bowl underneath. Of course, I have a general idea about babies, but I want to hear my mother, an anatomy teacher, give me her straightforward version of an answer.
“Babies come when a female sex cell is connected with a male sex cell,” my mother says, patting the mixture of meat and bread into palm-size kotlety. “Then a fetus is developed in a uterus, and nine months later a woman gives birth to a baby.”
I am grateful to her for this direct and daring explanation sprinkled with the words “male,” “female,” and “sex,” which I can bet are not used so nonchalantly in other apartments facing the courtyard. Chewing on my kotlety, I contemplate the weight and abstraction of my new knowledge. I am enlightened by adult anatomical vocabulary, yet still completely ignorant.
ON OUR WAY TO the medical school we pass a maternity hospital, a four-story building overlooking a little square with streetcar tracks crossing in the middle.
“This is where you were born,” says my mother.
In the summer, the hospital windows are opened, and young women lean out shouting details about their condition to their husbands, who are not allowed past the reception desk. “The water broke, but I’m still here,” one woman yells. “There hasn’t been any water, hot or cold, for three days,” screams another one. I am not sure they are talking about the same water, but I have no one to ask.
Like every maternity patient, my mother stayed in the hospital for a week. Husbands came in the evening, after work, to stand on the streetcar tracks in front of the hospital and shout questions to their wives who were hanging out of the windows.
“What color eyes?” They wanted to know, cupping their hands around their mouths so their voices could reach all the way up.
“Blue,” yelled the women, leaning out precariously. “All infants have blue eyes.”
“And hair?” The men persisted as streetcars jingled a warning for them to get off the tracks. “What color hair?”
Had my father been standing on those tracks instead of sulking in a friend’s dacha about becoming a father of a girl at fifty-five, I know what my mother would have shouted down. I’ve seen my pictures as an infant. “No hair,” she would’ve said. “Bald. Just like Khrushchev.”
Amid all this clamor, waiting for my father, she stood in the window to show me to the other women’s husbands, to the people peering out of the open streetcar windows.
Still, seeing the maternity hospital does nothing to get me closer to understanding. Like the inside of the hospital wards, the secret is still just that, a secret.
I STAND UNDER A poster for a movie, Love Under the Elms, hanging in our local House of Culture, which bears the name of the First Five-Year Plan. The poster shows a tree with heavy, sprawled branches that must convey the weighty and complicated nature of that love. It is an American movie, but it stars Sophia Loren, who everybody knows is Italian. I don’t understand how an Italian actress can star in an American film, how the borders between countries can be so unprotected and so easily crossed. But there is even a bigger question looming in my head, the question about the title. It is based on a play by an American playwright, Eugene O’Neill, as my friend Masha, whose mother teaches college English, informed me, and its real title is Desire Under the Elms. So what does this mean? Are desire and love the same? Or did the translator take too broad a license? Or—the more likely possibility—was the change in translation deliberate, a metamorphosis from the bodily and the sensual toward the soulful and the more lofty? None of us is surprised, for example, when during rehearsals Marina’s theater removes whole passages from Western plays. After all, as everyone knows, the capitalist West with its economy and art can produce nothing but vulgarity and shame.
I’m afraid I will never learn the answer to any of these questions. Under the film title there is a warning: forbidden for children under sixteen. This means there is a kiss on the screen, a real kiss where you can see the lips, not where all they show is the back of the head. The warning is written in small, but deliberate letters, and it means that for four more years I won’t be able to see robust Sophia Loren—in love, or desire—who undoubtedly knows more about the secret than the skinny, black-and-white heroine of Men in Her Life.
I think of wasp-waisted Sophia Loren in a flaring skirt, as I recently saw her in our movie magazine, Screen. She was walking on twiggy heels past some baroque buildings on an Italian street, which looked like any of our streets, except for the absence of flags and slogans stretched over the façades. Looking at the poster, I try to imagine her in America, but there is nothing concrete to anchor the image. We never see America on television; it’s a fictitious place, too foreign and too far away.
There is no man on the poster, so I imagine Sophia Loren and the tall, enticing Volodya from my mother’s anatomy department lying under the elms, immersed in their desire. They are experienced and urbane: Sophia Loren because she is from a capitalist country, and Volodya because he is eighteen and has a real job. I envy them both, but I envy Sophia Loren more.
I wonder if other countries have the secret, and if it is as well-guarded as it is here. I can decipher nothing from A. J. Cronin or even the supposedly raunchy Guy de Maupassant. Maybe in sultry Italy, or stately England, or mythical America, they are all born with some inherent knowledge. Maybe the secret is like their borders—unprotected and easily permeable.
IT IS THE LAST day of my vacation, and I must say good-bye to the museum, Aunt Klava, and human anatomy. I won’t be back until next fall, another revolution anniversary when schools close for a recess. The diagram I have been copying for days is finished and propped on a museum desk. It is perfect in the precision of its red arteries and blue veins, a splash of color among jars of monochromatic organs.
I pace along the corridor, past the doors with squares of glass in the middle. Professors stand in front of charts where human bodies are reduced to clusters of threads in primary colors, and behind one of the doors I see my mother pointing to a red clump inside a paper chest. I wonder if she loved my father with that hot, sweaty love that the poster for the Sophia Loren American movie promises. I wonder if my mother, with her need for order and marching in step with the collective, even knows about that kind of love. Or maybe she knew when she was young; maybe she used to know and then forgot.
I walk down to the basement and saunter past Zina’s lab and Volodya’s morgue. Both doors are closed, but I hear a giggle behind the lab door. I know it’s Zina’s giggle, the little laugh she lets out when Volodya is close. I stop by the door and stand there, although I don’t know what it is I’m waiting to find out. Then there are muted sounds of Volodya’s voice, more like bursts of whisper, then Zina’s babble, then rustling and stirring and breathing. I know I should leave, but I stand there, as if the soles of my shoes have become glued to the cement floor. I know I should leave, but the secret is right here, behind this door, so I stand and listen. There is a creaking noise, and the sound of a chair scraping the floor, and more breathing. There is more whispering and stirring and clanking. I don’t know how long the secret lasts and when it ends, so I can’t estimate when I should plan a safe retreat. It would be embarrassing, it occurs to me, if that door suddenly flew open and revealed me to the eyes of Volodya and Zina, an ignorant twelve-year-old standing in the hallway, spying on their adult ways.
Again, I feel disappointed. I’m angry that handsome Volodya is choosing to do the adult things with stringy-haired Zina, who ignores me, pretending to stare into her microscope when he is not around. But most important, I’m frustrated because this dangerous eavesdropping has not divulged anything new about the secret.
There is a door between us, as always, and that’s where all important things are kept, behind closed doors.
So I unglue my feet from the floor and go up to the dissection room. My mother’s class is just over, and her white-gowned students are tiptoeing away from the table on which lies the Man, now a scavenged body, a black skeletal frame with occasional flaps of muscle tissue hanging on dry bones between the joints.
“Go find Aunt Klava,” says my mother when she sees me. “And turn in your white coat.”
I don’t know that Aunt Klava is standing right behind me, so when I turn, I stumble straight into her sharp body. She opens her arms and holds my cheek to hers, her wiry hair prickling my face. She pats me on the back with her hand, so little and dry it could be a claw of a bird, rasping tobacco-smelling words into my ear. I can’t make out what she is saying, but it must be a good-bye wish, and we stand like this for a few moments, exposed to the gaze of the whole class of freshmen who have just reduced a human body to the anatomical museum display of its parts.
I wish live bodies were as logical and scientific as cadavers. I wish they didn’t contain any secrets, thrilling and shameful, protected by those who know them with the same zeal we use to protect our borders from foreign intervention. I wish I were sixteen so I could see Love Under the Elms, in color, with real American men, and real passions, and a real mouth-to-mouth kiss as big as the screen of our local House of Culture, which bears the name of the First Five-Year Plan.
I wish I could ask my mother—the one that is gone, the one in the portrait—about the secret, about life, about love and desire. I wish I could ask her about my father.
My mother—the real one—takes off her white coat and her cloth hat and folds them up neatly for Aunt Klava. “The dissection is over,” she says and smiles a teacher’s smile. “It’s time to go home.”