YOU AND YOUR FRIEND Nina can celebrate,” whispers my English professor, Natalia Borisovna, into my ear. “The head of the department and the leader of our local party cell have approved your candidacies. You’re starting next week.” She wraps her arm around my shoulder to indicate her approval: I am considered mature enough to teach Russian in the six-week summer program for American students. I don’t know why she has to whisper; maybe it must be kept secret that there are live Americans wandering around the university premises in such close proximity to Soviet citizens.
Nina and I have just graduated from the English department of Leningrad University. As soon as Natalia Borisovna releases her hold on my shoulder, I rush across town to tell Nina the good news, and we celebrate in her kitchen with menthol cigarettes, pondering through the clouds of smoke how brilliantly we are going to lure our capitalist students into the world of Russian language and literature.
At home, I don’t feel so cavalier. Aside from a freshman class I was assigned to teach in my senior, sixth, year, I’ve never stood in front of a group of students. Especially foreign students, who are probably used to teaching methods that are uncommon and advanced, like everything else in America. We get reports from emigrants—stories that reach us through a complicated chain of connections—that in America you can buy mushrooms in March and strawberries in December; that there is never a shortage of books—any books; that a police officer who stopped one such emigrant for speeding asked him to step out of the car because he didn’t want to humiliate him in front of his ten-year-old son. The last story seems so unbelievable and maudlin it makes me snicker. What kind of government worries about hurting the feelings of its citizens, especially children? Everyone knows that a government is supposed to govern, not sympathize, as Lenin pointed out in 1918. Ours is busy enforcing residency regulations that ban us from moving, and issuing refusals to emigration petitions, which guarantee that applicants will be kicked out of their jobs and then publicly humiliated. If our feelings aren’t bruised, we instantly become suspicious.
I realize I know so little about America it’s embarrassing. I’ve never seen an American newspaper or magazine; decreed subversive and dangerous, they are all confiscated at the border. The only American English I’ve heard was an interview with Angela Davis, the head of the Communist Party of the United States, whom I could barely understand because she rolled her r’s in a way our phonetics professor called “utterly un-British.”
I haven’t read anything besides what we all read in class—Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (an anti-war declaration) and Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (an exposé of capitalist ulcers). The rest of the books, the ones that don’t denounce or expose, trickle in at unpredictable intervals, like deliveries of mayonnaise or imported shoes to local stores. Recently one of our professors snuck in a contemporary novel called The Other Side of Midnight from her recent trip to England, and I’m now in line to read it behind all the full-time faculty of the English department. I’ve estimated that at the present rate it should reach me in about four weeks since the first person in line read the book in two days.
And I’ve never seen a live American.
CLASSES START IN THE middle of June. I teach three times a week, from 9:00 to 11:50 A.M., grammar and conversation. I’ve prepared myself for the nauseating feeling of first-day trepidation, a familiar gut jiggle we all know from annual school visits to the dental clinic or from quiet struggles with school authorities who try to arm-twist good students into serving as local Komsomol, or Young Communist, leaders. Yet, surprisingly, I don’t tremble inside when I walk through the door of my first class and face fourteen Americans, staring at me with the same intense curiosity with which I stare back at them. My Russian is by far superior to theirs, and since this is an immersion program and we can’t use any English during class, I will always have the upper hand, at least linguistically.
As we go through the introductions, I look into their faces, not as foreign as their accents. Lisa from Vermont, blonde and broad-boned, could have come here on a weekend bus tour from Finland; Charles from Virginia, in round spectacles and pimples, looks as if he belongs in the advanced math and physics school, # 239, two blocks from where I live. They look familiar—Steven, Mary, Tony, who immediately become Stepan, Masha, and Anton—yet their otherness is exposed by their open glances, their straight backs, their eagerness to speak our convoluted language, full of conjugations, noun cases, verb aspects, and palatalized consonants that no foreigner can master. They are uninhibited and unafraid. They are earnest and straightforward. They are the opposite of me.
They are from good universities—Dartmouth, Columbia, Duke. I’ve never heard of any of those schools, but I nod as though I have. This is also a good university, I say, looking around. I don’t know if it’s true—I have no references, no comparison lists, no guides—but I sound as though I do. They nod vigorously, da, da, a very good school. Only the dorm is somewhat antikvarny, they say. No, I correct them in a teacher’s tone—staryi— old, not antique.
They laugh. Of course, not antique, far from antique. What I don’t tell them is that it’s not even old. It was built five years ago, when I was just starting at the university and passing the building four days a week on the way to school. The rickety scaffolding creaked in the wind, and the workers in quilted vatnik jackets and ushanka hats staggered around, half-drunk, taking with them at the end of the day everything they could carry—doorknobs, faucets, nails. It was a normal construction site, and the dorm is a normal new building—instantly old and as shoddy as everything else.
The Americans are diligent students. They do their homework and ask questions. During breaks they struggle with case endings to tell me what they saw the previous afternoon after class. The Hermitage and Peterhoff fountains. The cruiser Aurora, permanently anchored on the Neva bend not far from their dorm, which signaled the storming of the Winter Palace with one blank cannon shot. Lenin’s hiding place in the Leningrad suburb of Razliv, a straw tent with the leader’s cap and boots displayed on top of a tree stump. “Only they weren’t even his original cap and boots,” says Anton in an acerbic voice. Copies, the sign says; originals safe-guarded in the Kremlin. “Safe-guarded?” asks Anton, with amused disdain. “Cap and boots in a Kremlin safe?” “They’re afraid someone may steal them,” I offer, “some kapitalisty like you.” They laugh, thinking it’s a joke. I meant it as a joke, yet—although I’ve never been to Razliv, having somehow dodged every school trip that would herd us there—I know this is the reason Lenin’s cap and boots in his straw tent are reproductions. Capitalists, as we all know, are enemies not to be trusted, who won’t hesitate to stoop to such a lowly thing as pilfering Lenin’s real belongings and selling them on the market to the highest bidder.
They tell me about the food at the university cafeteria. Uzhasnaya, they complain—awful. As an instructor for the American program, I have a pass to the cafeteria. It’s really a faculty cafeteria, but the visiting American students have a meal plan there so they won’t be instantly poisoned. When I eat at the cafeteria, I can’t help but linger by the desserts enthroned seductively under glass: squares of cake with roses of butter frosting, flaky puffs covered with chocolate, mountains of whipped cream I’ve never seen anywhere else. I gawk at the stuffed cabbage, whose ingredients include meat, at the carrot salad studded with raisins. For one ruble, I load my tray with delicacies and wolf them down at a corner table, away from other people’s eyes. For some reason I feel as if I were here illegally, undeserving of all this hard-to-get food my American students mock.
On Fridays, Nina and I and all the teachers go to the main auditorium to hear lectures on Russian history and literature given to the American students by our best university professors. It isn’t that we’re so eager to be enlightened about the Decembrists’ uprising of 1825 or Lermontov’s “useless people.” After the lecture, the head of the program, an elegant young woman who is rumored to be married to a KGB colonel, unveils a table with an electric samovar and a pile of big poppy seed bagels called bubliki, and, along with our students, we drink tea out of traditional glasses propped in metal holders. The real reason we come here is to hear and speak English.
The English we hear is more robust, more dauntless than the British voices on our language-lab tapes. These vowels split jaws; these consonants clatter. My students don’t hesitate now, trying to remember a word or think of a correct noun ending. They are fast and at ease. Navigating their own language puts them in control.
The students from my class have crowded around the samovar and are taking turns swiveling the handle that releases boiling water into a glass.
“You look a little like Natalie Wood,” says Charles from Virginia, biting into a bublik.
I don’t know who Natalie Wood is, but I wrinkle my forehead, not quite sure if I heard the name correctly. “Natalie Wood?” I ask and squint my eyes. She is probably someone everyone knows but me.
“An actress. In movies, you know,” says Charles. “Her parents were Russian, you know.”
I don’t know. But should I know? Should I be happy that he compared me to an actress with immigrant parents?
I smile and nod. “My sister is an actress, you know,” I say, trying to carry on this conversation.
Charles utters something in response and I pretend I understand it. I pretend I’m happy.
Then I notice the program director, the one with the KGB husband, giving me sharp looks, and I wonder if I’m pretending too zealously, if she might think that I’m really feeling happy among these students, whom we are glad to introduce to our language and culture but who will always, no matter how innocent they may sound, remain our ideological opponents in the world struggle for mankind’s bright future.
I decide to change position and move to where Nina is standing with two of her students, looking just as happy as I must look to the program director. Cynthia and Robert from her class are older, both graduate students in schools whose names come rattling from their mouths, indecipherable, like a good part of what they say.
“Robert is a writer,” says Cynthia. “Science fiction. He just had a book published,” she boasts, as if it was she who had published a book. “And it’s a good one.”
Robert rubs his forehead and smiles a crooked smile, half timid, half haughty. His eyes squint through thick glasses, and his hand rakes his hair, so curly his fingers get tangled.
“Robert Ackerman,” says Cynthia. “Remember this name,” she mocks, wagging her finger.
Robert smiles and rolls his eyes, chagrined but flattered. I also smile, but not too eagerly, because the program director is again looking in my direction.
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, AFTER my class, when I walk out of the building nicknamed “Catacombs” into the drizzly grayness of the university yard, I find Robert leaning against a tree, waiting.
“Nina told me this is where you’re teaching,” he says, his hands in the pockets of his corduroys, his hair like tiny corkscrews standing on end around his narrow face. Visually he clashes with everything around him—with the birch trunk he is leaning against, with the feeble pansies by his feet, with the cracked and flaking walls behind him—looking utterly un-Russian, looking as if he’d fallen from space. I glance around to make sure the program director isn’t anywhere near to witness this unsanctioned, after-class contact with a foreigner.
We walk out of the courtyard through the main building, past the marble staircase and the huge mirror where Nina and I used to meet before classes, into the gray expanse of the Neva Embankment. The clouds are so low that they have swallowed the top of the Admiralty’s spire on the other side of the river; the end of the gold needle looks as if it’s been broken off.
“It’s so damp,” Robert says. “Like being under water.”
“It’s normal,” I say. “It’s the river, the sea, the swamp, you know.” I’m proud of myself for using that American colloquial “you know,” which I learned from my student Charles. I feel remarkably nonchalant walking past the university with such a foreign-looking man—both American and Jewish, both unwelcome here—whose otherness announces itself in his long, corkscrew hair and well-fitted corduroys and leather shoes that don’t seem to maim his feet. Who, in addition to all these improbabilities, is also the author of a published book.
We slowly walk along the embankment, looking down at the slabs of granite under our feet, not knowing what to say.
“So what do you do when you don’t teach Americans how to speak Russian?” Robert asks in his restless American English after a few minutes of silence.
I’m not sure if this is a question about my official life or my private life. Is he asking what I do at the university or what I do at home, what I say to my English professor or what I say to Nina? Which me is he interested in, the proper university teacher and Komsomol member or the real, smirking, cynical person I am with my friends?
“I teach English,” I say. “Grammar, reading, conversation. We read Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga. Volume One, The Man of Property.”
Robert chuckles and scratches the back of his neck. “Isn’t it boring as hell?” he asks.
“It reveals the ulcers of capitalism,” I say.
He peers at me through his thick glasses to see if I’m serious, to see if it’s time for him to remember that he’s left a kettle boiling over back in his dorm or some other thing that will require his immediate attention.
“It’s boring as hell, you’re right,” I say and give him a smile. It’s not that difficult to choose between the two people inside me. With a Jewish-American writer who has chosen to wait for me, out of all the university women prancing around him with samovars and bubliki, I am going to be the real me.
“And what do you do when you don’t write science fiction?” I ask.
“I’m a physicist,” Robert says.
A physicist, I quickly repeat in my mind, not to be confused with a physician, one of my first lessons from a translation class. Not a physician, as my mother was during the war, a kilometer from the German front.
“Nuclear and astrophysics,” explains Robert. “The expansion of the universe, the theory of relativity, black holes. I’m finishing my dissertation at the University of Texas.”
I know nothing about physics. In high school, it was the only subject in which I received a final four instead of a perfect five, the four that prevented me from getting a high school diploma bound in red plastic instead of black.
“I also play the oboe,” says Robert, trying to soften the hard edges of science with music, probably thinking he’s intimidated me with his physics credentials because I don’t say anything. Indeed, I am intimidated; I know as little about music as I do about astrophysics.
“And why are you here?” I ask. “Taking Russian classes in Leningrad?”
Robert stops at the granite stairs leading to the water, to the small leaden waves that slurp onto the wet stone, and stares across the river at the gold cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Even in this damp light it radiates a shine that lifts the clouds off its surface, a little halo of insulation against the rain hanging in the air.
“They covered it with gray during the siege of Leningrad,” I say. “To make it look like everything else.”
Robert focuses on the cathedral as if snapping a mental photograph, then turns to me. “I like the Russian language,” he says. “I want to read Russian writers in the original. That’s why I’m here.”
Now I’m truly awed. I feel undeserving to be standing next to this brilliant American man who solves the problems of the universe during the day and then goes home to play the oboe and sweat over Crime and Punishment in Russian.
“Lenin-grad,” says Robert. “Doesn’t grad mean city?”
“Yes, the city of Lenin,” I say.
“But the form ‘Lenin’ is also the possessive of ‘Lena,’ isn’t it? ‘Lena’s’ in Russian is Lenin, right? So Leningrad literally means ‘Lena’s city.’” Robert looks pleased, as if he’s just solved a stubborn celestial equation. “This is your city,” he says and raises his arm as if bestowing the honor upon my head.
This never occurred to me, but Robert is right. He is even more right than he knows. Lenin’s real name is Ulyanov. Lenin is a pseudonym our legendary leader assumed to fool the tsar’s police when he was secretly shuttling between Russia and Finland to stir up the working masses in preparation for the revolution, and he chose it from the name of the great Siberian river Lena. So Lenin does literally mean Lena’s. Leningrad is literally my city.
ROBERT WAITS FOR ME every day I teach, three times a week, and we walk around the city’s center, looking at places he won’t find in his tour guide—real places, too ordinary to be included among the glossy snapshots of bronze statues and golden domes. We walk away from the baroque luxury of the Winter Palace to the part of the Neva where necks of construction cranes hang over the water, along the cracked asphalt side streets where crumbling arches lead into mazes of courtyards.
Robert is fascinated with courtyards. He’s read Dostoyevsky, and he wants to see those courtyard wells that depress the spirit and twist the soul into a truly Russian miserable knot. As far as I can see, a hundred years have changed nothing in terms of courtyards’ contribution to misery, so I delight Robert in stepping with him through the vaulted archways to gawk at aluminum garbage bins that spill rotting potato peels and chicken bones, at broken walls bristling with wires, at piles of rusted sheets of metal brought in at some point for a renovation that never happened.
Robert tells me about Austin, Texas, where he studies, and Trenton, New Jersey, where he lives, the two places fused in my mind, foreign and unintelligible, two black holes in his puzzling universe. He tells me about the films he’s seen, the people he’s met, the things he’s bought, but he might as well be talking about nuclear physics. I don’t know what “special effects” or “star wars” mean; I have no idea who “teaching assistants” are; and I have never heard the word “parka.” But I nod, pretending I understand, pretending I am sophisticated and worldly. I am a professional at the game of pretense; I’ve perfected my skills over years of practice. Robert doesn’t suspect a thing.
In the beginning of the last week of classes I take him to my courtyard. It is better than many, with a playground in the center—a sandbox and a tall slide made of splintery wood down which I used to glide during nursery school winters. The same ankle-deep puddle in the middle of the yard gleams with a rainbow film of gasoline; “Zoika’s a bitch” is scratched into the wall next to the padlocked door where the scary garbageman of my childhood used to shovel the refuse thrown down the chutes.
The chutes are now padlocked, too, and Zoika, who was indeed a bitch ten years earlier, has left her mother to live somewhere on the other side of the Ural Mountains.
“Would you like to see my apartment?” I ask Robert. It’s probably against the rules of the department for a teacher to take a capitalist student home, even if a student is from someone else’s class. A home visit must normally be set up and approved by the director or, more likely, the director’s KGB husband, but we are here already, in my courtyard, and it would be a wrong thing to do, contrary to all rules of hospitality, not to invite him in.
The front door scrapes open, we walk up the eight cement steps to the elevator, and I press the button to summon the rumbling car from above. As we wait next to the bank of wooden mailboxes, a door to one of the first floor apartments opens, the one where the current janitor, a tall woman in a burlap apron, lives. She clangs a key ring to find the one to lock the door, but the search goes on excruciatingly long, and I know, even though I’m standing with my back to her, that she is gawking at Robert, who looks even more alien inside my apartment building than he did out on the street. The janitor doesn’t even have to wait for him to open his mouth to tell he doesn’t belong here, with his corkscrew hair and his corduroys stamped with metal buttons no Soviet store has ever seen.
The elevator car finally shudders down to the first floor, and I pull the metal door open to let us in. Inside there is a stink of urine, the usual elevator smell, and as the cabin lurches up, we look down at our feet, our backs pressed to a plywood partition that cuts off half the space inside, making the car big enough for only two or three, making it as uncomfortable as everything else here. I curl my toes inside my shoes, embarrassed by this useless partition, by the reek of urine, by the janitor’s look of condemnation. It’s a stupid feeling, of course; I wasn’t the one who built this plywood atrocity, or pissed all over the floor, or branded Robert with a disdainful stare. But I am the one who let Robert see it and smell it. I am, in the words of our American program teacher-trainer, the facilitator of acquisition.
My mother is in the kitchen ironing, bent over an old blanket spread on the table, leaning with all her weight on the heavy iron she’s just heated on a stove burner. She’s doing the linens: sheets, duvets, and pillowcases that are cotton and wrinkle terribly when she wrings them out in the bathtub.
“This is Robert from my American program,” I say, as I wave for him to come to the kitchen. “I was showing him our courtyards, and then he wanted to see a Russian apartment.”
My mother straightens up and sets the iron on a metal trivet. Although she smiles back at Robert and stretches out her hand to meet his for a handshake, I can guess what she is thinking: Americans know nothing about manners; according to the proper etiquette, a man must wait for a woman to stretch her hand out first. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she says, taking off her apron. “Please make yourself at home while I organize some tea.”
“You can’t avoid having tea in a Russian house,” I say to Robert, who, I can see, is delighted at the prospect.
My mother is taking this tea very seriously, I can tell: she’s rooting in the cupboard for a jar of raspberry jam; she’s asking me to bring the good cups from my sister’s room. I take the cup assignment as an opportunity to show Robert the apartment, and I now look at Marina’s room through a foreigner’s eyes: creaky parquet, wavy and unwaxed for years; wallpaper with flowers that were once yellow; peeling windowsills with pots of aloe and feeble scallion shoots my mother pinches off for salad.
I open the balcony door, and the summer street noise tumbles into the room—trams, buses, and a line to the liquor store that snakes around the corner and ends somewhere under the balcony where we stand. “What are they selling there?” asks Robert in Russian—he’s switched to Russian completely, proud of his case endings, which make him rub his temples and squint his eyes before they stagger out of his mouth, tortured but nearly perfect.
They aren’t selling anything yet. People are lining up because they see a truck parked next to the store, which signals a delivery—of what exactly, no one knows. Yet whatever it is that has just been delivered isn’t going to last long, so they stand there waiting, leaning forward in hope of getting a glimpse of what they’re queuing up for. “Probably cheap vodka,” I say. “Or cheap port. We call it chernila, which means ink.” Robert smiles, and I know he’s just filed the new word away into the coils of his versatile brain.
I’m impressed by Robert’s kaleidoscopic talents, so inaccessible to me: physics, music, writing. I’m bewildered by his curiosity, by his willingness to travel to my city—a grandiose ruin hermetically sealed from the rest of the world—and live in it for six weeks. Most of all, I’m awed by his foreignness. I think I am even attracted to him, and if not to him as an individual, then to his otherness, to the classified, unknowable world he represents. The world I’ve been trying to decipher since I had my first private English lesson with Irina Petrovna when I was ten, the secret and closed place where English is spoken, the place I know so well and yet don’t know at all. Everything alien and mesmerizing and seductive has fused together and condensed in one person gawking down from my balcony at the line for cheap ink.
“Tea is ready!” yells my mother from the kitchen, where Robert and I carry the good cups ensconced on good saucers, the gold-rimmed set my mother inherited from her parents. In addition to a bowl with raspberry jam, I see an open box of chocolates on the table my mother has extracted from the reserve cache of jars of mayonnaise and cans of tuna she keeps for holidays and special occasions. I take one and then one more; the chocolates have acquired a white patina of time from sitting in the cupboard for so long.
She asks Robert about the program, but from her absentminded questions I can see this is just polite small talk. What she really wants to know is what Robert does in America. Where he works, where he lives, with whom. Mundane questions, as practical as my mother.
He studies in Texas, finishing his PhD in physics. Robert rubs his forehead, thinking of the correct conjugations and declensions. When he is not in Texas, he is in his mother’s house in New Jersey. New Jersey? asks my mother. Close to New York City, he says. On the other side of the Hudson. Hudson? asks my mother. The word in Russian is Goodzon, which must sound funny to Robert, as if the Hudson River were a good zone in the middle of the otherwise rotten place.
We spread butter and spoon raspberry jam onto slices of bread, so fresh it gives way under the load. Much better than the cafeteria food, says Robert, chewing and smiling, although I can’t see how bread with dacha raspberry jam can be better than the professorial cabbage stuffed with real meat or the bowls brimming with whipped cream.
While Robert is searching for verb endings, my mother gives him pointed looks. She is trying to figure out what to think of this home visit, knowing all too well that I won’t be the one to reveal the truth. It’s a game we’ve been playing for as long as I can remember, a game of pretending, not unlike the vranyo game we all play with the state. I pretend that my bringing Robert home means nothing, and she pretends to believe me. She knows I won’t tell her what I really think about Robert, and I know that she knows that I know.
The truth is I haven’t yet decided how I feel about Robert myself.
“DON’T BE AN IDIOT,” says Nina. “This is one chance in a lifetime.”
On Saturday, the Russian language program is over, and all the students are flying back to the United States. As I’ve anticipated, with both hope and trepidation, Robert has said he is sorry to leave. “I don’t want to say good-bye to you,” he uttered in Russian slowly, in search of the perfect grammatical structure.
“I’m sorry you’re leaving, too,” I said and sighed.
“Maybe I can come back in six months,” he offered. “When the fall semester is over at my university.”
“I hope you can. I would like that very much,” I said. “Your coming back.”
I repeat this to Nina, without mentioning my deliberate sighing. “If I could,” she says, “I’d be out of here on the first goddamn plane. This country is doomed, and we’re doomed with it. I’d go anywhere. I’d go to Patagonia if I could.”
But she knows she can’t. She has just married an engineer named Rudik she fell madly in love with, and now they’re living in her two-room apartment with her parents and her brother. I visited them recently in lieu of going to the wedding they didn’t have. Nina cooked a fabulous dinner, and we drank a bottle of red Bulgarian wine I brought, heating it in a pot with sugar and sliced apples to get rid of the acidic taste. Rudik was tentative, not quite a host in his in-laws’ apartment, not quite the passionate romantic Nina had described him to be. He showed me a huge glass vat with coils, which I was certain he’d stolen from a chemistry lab at his job, where from water, sugar, and yeast he produces what he called idealniy samogon, perfect moonshine.
“Do whatever you have to do,” says Nina, “to get the hell out.”
ROBERT WANTS TO SEE a white night, and I take him just before he has to leave. Those of us born here are used to white nights, of course; we close the drapes and sleep right through them without any trouble. But tourists think it’s part of the experience to complain that they can’t catch a wink of sleep because the sun shines in their eyes. Influenced by the romantic nonsense on postcards, they have to flock to the Neva after midnight to gawk in consternation as the bridges open and slowly rise into the sky to let the ships on their way to the Baltic Sea pass through the city center.
Robert and I are walking on the wrong side of the river, from where the open bridges do not allow us to return until three in the morning. The needle of the Peter and Paul Fortress is glinting in the first rays of the sun, which is rising one hour past midnight, as usual, a copper disk making the brick-colored Rostrum Columns glow in the hues of pale rose. We watch the Palace Bridge split in the middle and creak up into the pale sky. Streams of high school graduates float past us—seventeen-year-olds decked out in dresses sewn by their mothers and suits borrowed from their family armoire, celebrating their new freedom. Their exuberance dances on the steel grid of the bridges, bounces off the stone fence of the embankment.
Robert holds my hand, then puts his arm around my shoulders. I find my ear pressed to the wool of his sweater, which has a foreign, antiseptic smell. I don’t know what I want him to do—to hold me closer or to let me go. If he holds me closer, I’ll have a chance of getting on an international flight out of here, as Nina thinks I should. If he lets me go, I’ll be back to my mother’s apartment, to our life of pretense and vranyo. I’ll be back in my courtyard, which is a much better emblem for our life here than a ubiquitous hammer and sickle: the crumbling façade with locked doors and stinking garbage bins behind it.
Robert tightens his embrace, touching his lips to my temple, and we stand there, like so many other couples around us, gawking at the open bridge with its arms stretched to the sky.
I TIPTOE INTO THE hallway of my apartment around four in the morning, when the sun has crept past the cupboard and is glinting on the kitchen stove. In her ghostly nightgown, my mother is shuffling toward the bathroom, her hair, mussed by sleep, slithering down her back in a skinny braid. Robert and I said good-bye in Decembrists’ Square, halfway between his dorm and my house. He was going to see me home, but I wanted to be sure he could find his way back.
“What are you doing up so late?” My mother squints in my direction. It takes her a minute to see that I am dressed in street clothes. “Where have you been?” The light beams in her eyes as she lumbers closer. “It’s the middle of the night,” she says, shielding her face from the sun.
I haven’t told my mother anything about Robert, just as I haven’t told her anything else about my life that is of any importance. I don’t want to face her lecturing, or her guilt-provoking tirades, or her advice. What could she possibly advise me regarding a fledgling love affair with an American, my mother who was born along with the Soviet state? What advice could she give me about anything? In our brief interactions I inform her about my university classes and private lessons—always the summary of the outcomes, never the curves of the process. I recite the courses I’ve taken, the new students acquired. She seems to think she is in control of my life.
“It’s white nights,” I say and look out the window at the tide of the gleaming roofs that roll toward the horizon. “The whole city is awake. Everyone’s out on the streets, everyone’s in love.”
“I don’t care about everyone,” says my mother. “I worry about you. You’re my daughter, and at four in the morning you should be safe at home. Where were you?”
A wave of fatigue rolls over me, a lull of exhaustion. I have been so diligent in slicing my soul in two and keeping the real half to myself, away from the outside, away from my mother, who wants me to be safe.
“Out on a date,” I say, scraping with my fingernail at something stuck to the oilcloth. “With a foreigner, an American. The one who came to see our apartment.”
I see my mother gasp as her face begins to twitch with restrained tears.
“An American?” she squeezes out as if the words themselves would blemish her. “American” and “date” in the same phrase, as I should’ve known, have fused into a powerful compound fraught with explosive consequences. She glowers at me, swallowing the oncoming tears. “Aren’t there any Russian fellows around? Nice university graduates?”
She waits for my response, for some indication that I am open to normalcy. Out of the corner of my eye I see her swallow hard as I deliberately continue to trace the oilcloth flowers with my fingernail.
“What’s wrong with you?” she yells. “You’re exactly like your father—stubborn as a goat.”
Strangely, I feel removed from this whole scene, watching the action from the wings, like a director during a performance. My mother, the tragic heroine of the second act, admonishing a prodigal daughter. Robert’s taste is still lingering in my mouth; American kissing and groping are no different from what they are here. Although my mother’s voice is trembling, suspended on the brink of crying, I can’t help thinking of a joke Nina has told me: A mother barges in on a daughter in bed with a man and laments, Next she’ll start smoking.
On my way to the kitchen door, sharpening my voice like a knife, I turn to my mother, hunched over the table.
“And, by the way, I also smoke,” I say and shut the door behind me.
What comes out of my mouth is driven by anger: at my righteous mother, who refuses to look out the window and see there is no bright dawn on the horizon; at my black-hearted country that inspired her, forged her into steel, and deceived her.