Robert looks at me quizzically and I look at Marina, who is conveniently staring down, scrubbing her plate.
“Wait,” says my mother as her face becomes older. “What does this mean, you’re getting married?”
I don’t know how to answer her question. “It means we have to go to the Acts of Marriage Palace, the central one on the Neva, and find out about the procedures,” I say, grasping at an opportunity to switch to the clear-cut matters of bureaucratic routine. “Tomorrow is Wednesday, so we’ll go tomorrow. It’s all right,” I add, a signal to Marina to save her stage voice, a signal to my mother that I’ve made up my mind.
“So when are you planning to … get married?” asks my mother, pausing before the last two words, as though her mouth cannot contort to their shape.
I feel strange hearing these words directly aimed at me. I’m twenty-four, and no one but Robert has ever contemplated marrying me. Yet it is not my advancing age and a fear of remaining single, like my sister, that have made me accept Robert’s offer.
It feels like a revelation, although somewhere inside me, where familiar things are stripped naked, I have known this all along. I want to leave this country, which, it dawns on me, is so much like my mother. They are almost the same age, my mother and my motherland. They are both in love with order, both overbearing and protective. They’re prosaic; neither my mother nor my motherland knows anything about the important things in life: the magic of Theater, the power of the English language, love. They’re like the inside of a bus at a rush hour in July: you can’t breathe, you can’t move, and you can’t squeeze your way to the door to get out.
From his guest chair at the head of the kitchen table, Robert gives my mother an uneasy, regretful smile, as if to apologize for planning to take me to the other side of the Earth, to a place so faraway that the thought of it alone has filled her eyes with tears, making her blink.
THE NEXT DAY, DESPITE my plan, we don’t go to the Acts of Marriage Palace. Our Supreme Soviet announces that it has sent troops to Afghanistan in order to help it rid itself of the atavisms of capitalism. The news is all over the front pages of Pravda and Izvestiya, in long articles with fat headlines explaining that if we didn’t invade Afghanistan, it would be gobbled up by the war-mongering United States. “Chorny pauk—like a bloodthirsty black spider,” reads Robert from a Pravda on the kitchen table, “the U.S. is always on the lookout for new opportunities to strangle socialism and catapult the world back to the dark, retrograde, pre-revolutionary past.”
“Gobbled up by the United States?” asks Robert, raising his eyebrows. “I’ve been to Afghanistan; there’s nothing there worth gobbling up.”
We trek all over the city center in search of an English-language newspaper that will explain what’s really happening. In the lobby of Hotel Europe on Nevsky Prospekt, where I sneak in on Robert’s heels while a doorman is gawking at a parked BMW, we find the Morning Star, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the Daily World, published by the Communist Party of the United States. “I’ve never seen these papers,” says Robert. “In America or England.” But he doesn’t buy them, even out of curiosity. He wants to read the real news, he says. He wants to know pravda, the truth, with Pravda, stacked up in piles everywhere we look, being the last place to find it.
We fumble through a stack of papers in Polish, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, and French, until Robert pulls out something with wobbly lines printed on pinkish paper, the Financial Times of India. We hurriedly leaf through the pages of unsteady print that gives me an instant headache, looking for some mention of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, until I glance at the date and see that the paper is a week old.
I wish I could shield Robert from the onslaught of all this media nonsense on both TV channels, from announcers with serious voices and pensive eyes. I am immune to the lead articles in Pravda, vaccinated against the official line by Aunt Polya back in nursery school. I don’t pay any attention to the somber drone of the television program Vremya, which my mother switches on at nine before she goes to bed. I walk right past the grainy clips from military parades, past marching soldiers and banners unfurling in the wind that are supposed to stir up our patriotic fervor. The only thing that currently concerns me is how this new international development is going to affect the regulations for marrying a foreigner, my future visa prospects, and the Aeroflot plane schedule between Leningrad and New York.
I LEAVE ROBERT IN the Russian Museum and go to the Bureau of Foreign Marriages to find out what papers they require. My mother goes with me, to provide support against pigheaded red-tapists, she says, and I don’t mind. She has her own scores to settle with bureaucracy. Ten years ago, her medical institute put her in charge of advising a group of students from Hungary, who spent most weekends of their academic year in our kitchen, cooking goulash with stringy beef and red paprika they’d brought from home in little canvas bags. The students—grateful to my mother, who tutored them in anatomy and Soviet survival skills—invited her to visit them in Budapest, where she could meet their parents and taste the proper goulash made from real meat. But the miscreants from the visa department, after she’d bought a caseful of souvenirs for gifts and collected a dossier of required character reports, refused her a visa. It was un-Soviet, they said, for a professor to visit a foreign student’s home.
The Foreign Marriage Bureau is on the Neva, one of those former mansions that remain from our despotic past. The application office is on the first floor, under the marble stairway barred with the kind of thick red velvet rope used to cordon off museum exhibits. The building is solemn and empty; there don’t seem to be many foreign marriages. Behind the office door is a woman in her forties with graying hair cinched in a bun, her face as round and rosy-cheeked as my provincial aunt Muza’s.
“What documents are needed to marry a foreign citizen?” I ask nervously, my voice echoing off the five-meter ceiling of a home that used to belong to a count or a prince.
“What country?” asks the woman, and she peers at me as if trying to guess the answer.
“Se-Sh-Aa,” I say—the sounds hiss out of my mouth, more sibilant in Russian than the English “USA.”
The woman blinks and turns to my mother as if seeking confirmation of this statement, even more outrageous since December 25, when our government successfully preempted the American efforts to usurp Afghanistan. My mother holds her gaze and sighs.
The woman sighs, too, signaling her understanding of my mother’s silent suffering, then comes from behind her desk and stops in front of me. “My dear,” she says and cranes her neck trying to peer into my face. “You’ve fallen in love, is that it? With someone from a faraway land?” She smiles a motherly smile—too motherly—but I cannot show her what I think. I know I have to play the game and respond to her cue. I know that the fate of my leaving this place has now been placed in her hands.
I smile sheepishly and nod.
The woman steps back and lifts her chin, assuming a pose for delivering an important message. “Well, the rules for capitalist countries are actually the same as for socialist ones,” she says. “This is one area where we don’t discriminate. Marriage is marriage, and the wife should follow her husband no matter where he lives.” I’m relieved to hear this piece of medieval wisdom, but it sounds a bit too accommodating for an official line, too suspiciously easy.
“Both you and your fiancé must fill out an application here in person.” She recites the rules with inspiration, as if they were lines from Pushkin’s poetry. “You need your passport, your proof of residency in Leningrad, your birth certificate. He needs his passport and his visa. Then you wait three months.”
“Wait?” I ask. “Wait for what?”
“We give you this period in case you change your mind,” she says, smiling.
“But we’re sure we aren’t going to change our mind,” I say.
“Then in three months you come again and we register your marriage,” says the woman and cocks
her head to underscore the benevolence of the state rules. “Both of you. In person.”
“But that means he has to travel here again,” I say, raising my voice involuntarily. “All the way from America. All the way from Texas!”
The woman shrugs her shoulders, undoubtedly having heard this before. “What can you do?” she says, pretending to sympathize with me, exchanging glances with my mother. “Rules are rules.”
“So then he will have to come again in March,” says my mother, her voice laced with the hope that he won’t.
“Can’t we come back in two weeks?” I ask pointlessly, knowing the answer. “He is only here for two weeks.”
The woman walks back to her desk and peers into a calendar. “March twenty-seventh,” she says. “That’s if you show up here tomorrow with all the papers in order, both of you.”
“MARCH TWENTY-SEVENTH?” SAYS ROBERT. “Can’t we come back in two weeks? Or in a month; I can stay here until the end of January.”
“This is the Soviet Union,” I say in a solemn voice, hoping that this will somehow explain everything. “We should be grateful that they’re allowing this at all.”
I don’t know if Robert thinks he should be grateful for having to be here during the coldest winter since the Leningrad siege of 1942 and having to pay in hard currency for the decrepit university dorm without heat. I don’t know if he thinks he should be grateful for having to arrange yet another trip here, visas and all, when the Soviet Consulate in New York has just been closed down in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
He gives his cheek a rub and sits there, thinking.
19. Wedding
FOR THE THREE MONTHS before our scheduled wedding, I’m not planning anything because I don’t believe it is really going to happen. In my mind, I’ve played out everything that could go wrong: Robert will come to his senses; the Soviet Embassy will refuse to issue a visa on learning that he’s going to marry a Soviet citizen; the border patrol will seize and detain him the moment he steps onto Soviet soil.
I go to work as usual, teaching my classes and chatting with Natalia Borisovna as if nothing were about to happen. I ask her advice on facilitating conversational fluency, and she whispers the latest gossip about the department secretary, who is marrying a Georgian and moving to Tbilisi. I’m afraid to think what she would say if I told her that I am marrying an American and moving to Texas. She might say nothing; such an announcement would most likely choke her.
Am I really going to marry an American and move to Texas? I feel as I did when I was eleven, standing on a diving board just before they kicked me out of the district pool for my lack of swimming ability, with ten meters of void between my toes and the green water below, clear and hard as glass. I never had the guts to jump, but I’ve always wondered what it would have been like, taking that step forward, plummeting through the chlorine-smelling air, splattering into the water that would reluctantly part and swallow me and seal over my head in caps of white foam.
Some days I’m free from doubt, confident that I am indeed going to marry and move, that I am only a few months away from a new life. And some days I’m not so certain. Some days I have to look at myself in the mirror to make sure that this person who uses the words “America” and “marriage” in the same sentence is really me. Aside from convicts dressed in blue jeans, I know nothing about America. I know what is not likely to happen to me: I won’t be sleeping under a bridge, as my mother whispers to Marina in the kitchen; I won’t be begging on the street, as the news report announces Americans are forced to do—by whom? I won’t be doing any of the things we are warned against by our press and by posters with fat men in top hats trampling over the huddling workers in chains. I know all this is a lie. But what is the truth? The only thing I can tell so far is that those convicts in blue jeans don’t seem to have that bad a life.
But sometimes, at night, when I stand at a bus stop where the only light is an amber square from a first-floor window, and the wind rattles in the round metal drainpipes chained to the façades, I am frightened. I shiver at the silence, at the cold, wet, empty air, at the nothingness of the night. If nothingness exists here, where I know everything, what will I have there, where I really know nothing? Where the bus stops and the air and the drains and the night are all so different that I may not even recognize them at all.
I want to tell my mother or, even better, simply bury my face in her breasts as I did a long time ago when I got lost in the woods. But I am no longer ten and cannot seem weak and show how scared I am, especially to her. It would frighten her, too. It would confirm that she was right all along when she gave Robert a first hard look, when she wanted me to apply to medical school instead of the philology department, when she raised her eyebrow in disdain fifteen years ago hearing that I wanted to learn English.
TWO WEEKS BEFORE ROBERT’s arrival, the phone rings in my apartment, and I hear the voice of Boris, whom I met in the Crimea. In the last year we’ve talked on the phone only twice: I called him on his birthday, and he called me on mine. He was planning to go to Novy Svet again that August, and we reminisced about boiling mussels on the beach and stealing grapes from the collective farm that made exported champagne. I no longer feel a melting in my belly when I hear his voice; I no longer feel like dropping everything and rushing to join him wherever he is.
He is in Leningrad, he says.
In Leningrad? He has never come to Leningrad before, not when I sent him a telegram as my mother was walking out the door to spend a week with her sister in the provinces, not when I bribed a conductor in Simferopol to put an extra person on a train headed north. And now, when I didn’t beg or bribe, he is here.
Can I meet him somewhere in the center so we can go to a restaurant?
I am not sure which makes me more nervous—seeing Boris or going to a restaurant. In my entire life, I’ve eaten at a restaurant only once. A surly waitress, who looked as if Nina and I had personally insulted her by sitting down at her table, tossed down a ten-page menu, only to announce that they had nothing but beef stroganoff. It was stringy, lukewarm, and expensive, and we swore never to go to a restaurant again. It was not a sincere promise; we both knew there were other, more exclusive places that actually had food, places guarded by unflappable doormen towering pompously in front of “no seats available” signs.
“So, can we meet?” asks Boris, notes of impatience around the edges of his voice. Or maybe he isn’t impatient; maybe he is nervous, too. After all, I am the one who is sitting in my apartment, a marriage stamp soon to decorate my passport, while he is propping up the wall of some telephone booth with buckled rubber tile on the floor and a smell of urine in the air.
I put on the two best pieces of clothing I own: a pair of corduroy Levis a girl from my American class gave me last summer and a jacket of rough suede Marina brought me from her theater tour in Riga five years ago. The day is too cold for such a flimsy jacket, but it looks so much better than my wool-padded winter coat. I spit into a container with dry, caked mascara, which we sometimes also use as shoe polish, and drag a little plastic comb over my eyelashes. The mascara congeals in clumps, and I carefully break them with a sewing needle, separating the eyelashes so that they look as thick and long as those of any American woman.
I see Boris first when I elbow my way out of the Nevsky Prospekt metro station. He stands with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his eyes blue as the Crimean sky. When he makes me out in the crowd, his lips stretch into a smile that three years ago would have stopped my heart.
“I got on the train as soon as I heard,” he says, taking me by the shoulders and kissing my cheek. “Natasha called me yesterday and told me.”
He sounds as if he were speaking of a disaster, a terrible accident that forced him to hop on the train and rush here. “Told you what?” I ask.
He peers at me to make sure I’m not joking. “That you’re marrying a foreigner and leaving.” His voice rises at the end, almost like a question. We’re wa
lking along Nevsky Prospekt, two specks in its afternoon crowds, and for a few seconds I don’t say anything as I shoulder my way through a cluster of people getting ready to storm a bus, the air filled with the clang of faulty transmissions and the shriek of brakes. “That you’re marrying an American,” he says, the word amerikanets hissing out of his mouth the same way it hisses out of my mother’s.
I don’t know how Natasha from Kiev, who sighed and gave Boris sad, longing glances back in our Crimean cove, could’ve learned that I’m going to marry Robert and leave. I look at Boris and shrug, letting him know that Natasha was right, that I am indeed responsible for this catastrophe that required him to abandon his engineering duties in Kiev and race to Leningrad.
We walk a little longer without saying anything, absorbed in the street noise, in the clatter of buses, trolleys, and trucks, in the ferocious whistling from a militiaman trying to prevent a few girls from jaywalking. Then Boris stops in front of a door with the words “Kavkazsky Restaurant” written in big neon letters on the façade above it, one of those places where no one can get in.
Boris tells me to wait and walks over to the doorman. His hand fumbles in his pocket and then produces a red and white pack of Marlboros, something I’ve seen only once because it’s a black-market item, just like blue jeans and Grundig radios with frequencies reaching beyond our jamming range that can tune into the Voice of America and the BBC. Is there also a red ten-ruble note stuffed under the Marlboro pack? I can’t see from where I stand, but the doorman, whose silly uniform looks like it was dusted off from Gogol’s “Overcoat,” steps away and does what he has theoretically been put there to do, open the door. Boris extends his arm, inviting me to enter, a little smile glowing in his eyes, the usual Boris who is older and wiser and knows everything.
A Mountain of Crumbs Page 28
