“Ah.”
“I went to the same musical school in Leningrad as her. They ruined her voice, and they ruined my voice, too. They made me a bass instead of a baritone.”
It’s about him now. About his opera career, the one he gave up to become, like most Soviet Jewish men, a mechanical engineer. It’s not about me. I breathe easily. At another recent dinner my father had put his arm around me, his face so close to mine that the whites and grays of his goatee nearly touched the grays of my stubble, and said: “I burn with a black envy [chyornaya zavist’] toward you. I should have been an artist as well.”
The weekend after the Marriott dinner, I call them from the rural house where I spend half the year, trying to work. “The French Internet says your book is one of the best of the year!” they shout.
“They love you in France!” my father says.
I don’t want to hear anything about the Internet, bad or good, but suddenly we’re laughing. We’re talking about my father’s design work on what would become the world’s biggest telescope in 1975, a telescope that, like most Soviet products big and small, died on arrival. “Oh, how many Hero of Socialist Labor awards were given for that damn thing, and it didn’t work!” my father says. This is our little world, Soviet satire, failed empires, ridiculous dreams. I am filled with longing for them, for their company. I’m smiling and snug under the covers, the first dusting of December snow out my window, thick, clean country snow.
Down and up. Up and down. I am forgotten. I am remembered. I am number thirty. I am beloved in France. What is this? This is parenting. The parenting he knew, the parenting he gave. It is familiar and safe. Safe for some of us.
A few weeks before, at another family gathering, my father leans over the small woman who is now my wife and begins one of his “life on the farm” monologues. “When I was young, I kill sheep. Girls say, ‘No! Is so cute.’ But I slice, slice.” He makes a slicing motion across the imaginary animal’s throat. I lean into my wife, for support, although she is too strong to need it. “Then there is too much cat in village. So I take kitten and I drown. Drown, drown.” The dunking motions are articulated. “And then, of course, chicken comes and—”
Before the hen’s neck can be wrung, my wife and I look at each other with understanding. He is trying to assert himself. And to scare her. But beneath the blood of the martyred animals—for no good reason, I remember the Hebrew term for sacrifice, korban—lies a more prosaic truth. I am married now and even further apart from him. Someone else has come between us.
The Sheep Killer wants his son back.
“My first memory of when I was eight is that when I heard classical music, especially violin, I would cry sometimes,” my father says. “I would hide under the table and listen to the music and feel sad and cry. This is when I started to think about my father. I didn’t have memories because I didn’t really know him, but the sadness of not knowing him was tied in with the music. There was something about my father that I couldn’t remember. I started to buy records in a neighboring village, not a big assortment, but my first record was Caruso when he was singing his final aria from Tosca.” With a furrowed brow, with all the sadness and empathy he can muster, my father begins to sing in Russian: “Moi chas nastal … I vot ya umirayu!”
The hour is gone … And I, desperately, die!
There is a photograph of my father at fourteen or fifteen, dressed in a full tsarist general’s uniform and wig, his eyes ablaze with the peaceful sadness I don’t think I have ever found outside of a handful of Russian novels or after a volley of strong cocktails. He has been cast as Gremin in the school production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. It is a difficult part for a young bass, but my father is known around his small village as Paul Robeson, after the African American singer barnstorming across the Soviet Union with his “Ol’ Man River.” “In my school I was a celebrity,” my father says. “Almost like you now.”
In an alternate universe, Russia is a kind and sympathetic democracy, my father is the famous opera singer he wished to become, and I am his adoring son.
Back at the modest three-story colonial in Little Neck, Queens, the Thanksgiving dinner is winding down. I think of something my father had told me when I interviewed him last. He was speaking of the war, of being a tiny kid who had just lost both his father and his best friend, Lionya. “I fed a dog somewhere,” he said. “You shouldn’t write that because people were dying in Leningrad, but I remember how I fed a dog with a butter sandwich my mother had given me, which I guess means I wasn’t starving.”
“Papa,” I say, “why don’t you want me to write that story?” Around the table, the family smiles and gives collective encouragement. It’s a fine story.
“I was ashamed because people were starving and I had a sandwich,” my father says. “But, yes, I guess you may put that in.”
My father sits at the head of a table before the carcass of an enormous American turkey. What he is ashamed of is the one act of decency I have yet encountered in all the tales of our family’s past. A young boy with a dead father and a dead friend bends down before a country dog and feeds it his butter sandwich.
And I know that sandwich. Because he has made it for me. Two slices of that dark, unbleached Russian bread, the kind that tastes of badly managed soil and a peasant’s indifference to death. On top of it, the creamiest, deadliest of American butter, slathered in thick feta-like hunks. And on top of that cloves of garlic, the garlic that is to give me strength, that is to clear my lungs of asthmatic gunk, and make of me a real garlic-eating strong man. At a table in Leningrad, and a table in deepest Queens, New York, the ridiculous garlic crunches beneath our teeth as we sit across from each other, the garlic obliterating whatever else we have eaten, and making us one.
To become a cosmonaut, the author must first conquer his fear of heights on a ladder his father has built for that purpose. He must also stop wearing a sailor outfit and tights.
HIS NAME IS VLADIMIR. Never Volodya, the diminutive, always Vladimir. Some may say he is not a handsome man, but he is a serious one. Maybe he laughed once, but I’ve never seen him laughing. You do not cross Vladimir. You do not trifle with his ideas. His full name is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and I love him.
Vladimir came to our Leningrad from a town on the Volga River. An excellent swimmer, he was a model for youths from the start. When he first came to Leningrad, Vladimir played a lot of chess. The tsar exiled him to Siberia, but he ended up in Munich and London and then Geneva and Finland. You can never tell with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. You think you’ve got an angle on him, but boom!—he’s like the wind. Vladimir was a Bolshevik, and he hated Mensheviks, because he didn’t like the liberal bourgeoisie and they did. Vladimir’s interests included ice-skating and creating an alliance of workers and peasants with which to overthrow the tsar. Everyone in Russia was very happy when Vladimir and his best friend, Joseph, came back to our town, ran out the tsar and later shot him, making life joyful for little children like me. Today Vladimir lies in a mausoleum in Moscow, but I can hardly believe that when there are signs all over our town that say LENIN WILL LIVE FOREVER! I should know, because recently my family moved to Moscow Square, which is on the road to the airport, and here the biggest statue of Vladimir in all of Leningrad towers over me and reminds me that I am not alone.
Moscow Square. Moskovskaya Ploshchad. This is where my life really begins. My recall of these years is attuned, vibrant, and frighteningly perfect. My brain has been slapped around enough so that entire volumes of data from college to marriage have been erased, but here there are no gaps. Except for one.
Moscow Square. It is built up in the grandiose Stalinist Soviet Imperial style to make the populace forget about the baroque trifles of olde tsarist St. Petersburg a few kilometers to the north. But the damn citizens, the Leningradtsy, they stubbornly refuse to forget.
Moscow Square: Its geometry is cold, its colors are muted, its size is gigantic, and there are occasional colonnades and assorted Gree
k flourishes to make the place seem timeless and inevitable. The square is so vast it seems to have its own microclimate, a clap of oily rain will slick down its hectares of brick and marble, and in the summer violets are known to burst out amid all the ideology.
Here is my frozen King Kong–sized Lenin, my love, nearly jumping in the direction of nearby Finland, with his hand pointed emphatically at the horizon, with his coat sexily unfurling in the wind. Indeed, there is so much movement atop his granite pedestal that some locals have dubbed him “the Latin Lenin,” as if any second he may launch into a salsa or, better yet, a proper Cuban rumba. Taking pride of place behind Lenin is a grandiose box of a building whose facade features workers, peasants, and soldiers marching solemnly toward the bright socialist future. This was destined to be a House of the Soviets, Leningrad’s equivalent of city hall, during the Stalin era, then became a top secret facility in which at least two American defectors (both part of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg spy ring) were reputed to work on military projects, and today is a sad, listless place where you can get a photocopy of your passport or certificate of military service done for a few rubles. The square’s dramatic Stalinist impact has further been cut short by the Citibank branch down the street, the Ford dealership a little farther down, the ad hoc slot machines around the corner, and the intermittent fruit stand hawking bright imported oranges, ethereal red peppers, and glossy pears from a distant galaxy. One of St. Petersburg’s 4.8 million McDonald’s (one for each citizen) hums along at the southwest corner.
But when I am growing up there is none of that! There is Lenin, there is the Top Secret Building for Defectors and Spies, and across the street is a marble-like structure of equally imposing size that contains another important aspect of Soviet life: the gastronom. To call a gastronom a supermarket would be to insult supermarkets everywhere. Rather it is a uniquely precapitalist space in which ham at times appears and then very rapidly disappears. The ham is often not precisely ham, but the fat around the ham. My mother wages a weekly battle with the gastronom staff to make sure they cut her the rosy, edible part of my favorite snack. On one fateful occasion, right before we emigrate, my mother begins to shout at the woman, “Why are you giving me nothing but fat?”
The year is 1978, when Soviet Jews are finally allowed to leave for Israel and, more happily, for the United States or Canada. My mother’s enemy in the stained white smock appraises her nose and dark hair and shouts back: “When you move to Israel they’ll slice the ham for you without fat!”
“Yes,” my mother answers. “In Israel I’ll have the fatless ham, but all you will ever have is the fat.” One can comment on the unkosher absurdity of this conversation, but in truth these are possibly the first brave and truthful words my mother has spoken in thirty years of careful Soviet life, the first time she has stood up for herself in front of “the system,” and the gastronom is the system at its most elemental.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Moscow Square. Statue of Lenin, Top Secret Building for Defectors and Spies, gastronom. And to the left of Lenin, a small copse of yolki, or spruces. When I am well enough from the asthma, Papa and I chase each other beneath the spruces, playing hide-and-seek. I am a tiny vertical dachshund and can slot myself in behind the thinnest tree, and Papa will pretend not to see me for the longest time, while I breathe in, fully breathe in, the rich green piney smell of the little arboreal fellow next to me. Rumor around the neighborhood has it that some drunk cut down one of the spruces to make himself a New Year’s tree and was sentenced to ten years in a penal colony for the crime. The fool! You don’t chop down a spruce in front of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
And here I am shuddering with excitement behind a tree while the big papa is hunting for me, he really can’t find me! And above me, Lenin is gesturing acquisitively toward Finland, his dome balder than my father’s, which is still fringed with some hair between the temples. I am hiding behind a spruce, and my father is singing, “Synochek, Igoryochik, gde ty?” (Little son, Little Igor, where are you?), and I am inhaling one forbidden icy spruce breath after another.
The sun is setting on us and Lenin and the House of Spies, and soon the game will be called off on account of cold. There is a theory floating around that I will become overheated from playing and that my hot bare neck will combine with the autumn frost to make the sickness return. Like Fermi’s Paradox this theory is difficult to prove one way or another, but generations of Russian women have worked it out in their kitchens, factories, and offices.
I do not want the game to stop. You know what, I still don’t want the game to stop. Not even today, May 25, 2012. Because my father is bigger than me. He is still the big one. And I can see him among the spruces in his light coat (which smells, as everything else does around here, of steaming cabbage) and his brightly colored, possibly irradiated, plaid scarf. And he is looking for me. Here is Father, above me, and here is Lenin above him, and this is my family and this is my country. Am I feeling this or am I thinking it? Both, I am sure. I already understand how easily a feeling can become a thought and the other way around.
“I’ve lost him, I’ve lost my son,” my father is wailing. “I’ve lost my little Igor. Where is he? I simply cannot find him.”
Is he kidding or is he seriously worried?
And I want to jump out and say, “Here I am! You haven’t lost me at all!” But this is against the rules of the game. Isn’t all the fun in staying hidden? You’re supposed to feel scared when the papa who’s looking for you gets closer, is about to find you, but instead I feel sadder when he seems to lose my scent. And then when he approaches I feel scared again. Sad, scared. Scared, sad. Is that what I’ve been looking forward to for so long in my sickbed? No, it is this: Suddenly Papa jumps out from behind an adjoining spruce, screams “Found you!” and I scream with joy and try to escape. He scoops me up in one easy gesture, hoists me onto his shoulders, and we walk past the Lenin, who is also happy that I’ve been found, toward our apartment one gigantic Stalinist block away where Mother is making cabbage soup, hot and tasteless.
We live on Tipanov Street, House 5, Apartment 10. A sign at the mouth of the street informs us that ALEXANDER FYODOROVITCH
TIPANOV (1924–1944) WAS A BRAVE DEFENDER OF THE CITY OF LENIN. IN 1944, HE SHIELDED HIS TROOPS WITH HIS BREAST AGAINST ADVANCING FIRE, ALLOWING HIS COMRADES A SUCCESSFUL CHARGE FORWARD. THE FEARLESS WARRIOR WAS POSTHUMOUSLY AWARDED THE TITLE HERO OF THE SOVIET UNION. I like to think that my grandfather Isaac, my father’s father, who also died in the war at a ridiculously young age, performed a similar feat, even if he wasn’t a Hero of the Soviet Union. Oh, how I would love to put my own breast in front of some artillery fire so that my comrades could charge forward and kill Germans. But first I will have to make a friend or two my own age, and that equally heroic feat is still years away.
As my father carries me from the hide-and-seek spruces by the Lenin statue to Tipanov Street, House 5, Apartment 10, we pass by the other important institution in my life, the pharmacy.
One of the most frightening words in the Russian language is banki, which nominally refers to the plural of a glass or ajar but which the Oxford Russian-English dictionary also helpfully describes as “(med.) cupping glass.” I’m not sure about the med. part, because I’ve yet to meet any sufferer of asthma, pneumonia, or any other bronchial disaster that this insane form of peasant remedy has ever cured. The local pharmacy carries few useful medicines, but the least useful of them is banki. The application of said “cupping glass” to the soft white back of a wheezing Leningrad boy in 1976 represents the culmination of three thousand years of not-so-great medical intervention beginning with the traditional practices of the Greeks and the Chinese and ending here at the pharmacy on Tipanov Street.
This is what I remember all too well. I’m lying on my stomach. The banki are produced; they are little glass jars, greenish in tint, each probably the size of my child-foot. My entire back is rubbed with Vaseline by my mother’s strong
hand. What follows is frightening beyond words for any sane adult, let alone an anxious child. A pair of tweezers wrapped in cotton is soaked in vodka or rubbing alcohol and set on fire. The flaming pincers are stuck into each glass cup, sucking out the air to create suction between the cup and the skin. The cups are then clamped along the length of the patient’s back, supposedly to pull the mucus away from the lungs but in reality to scare the little boy into thinking his parents are raving pyromaniacs with serious intent to hurt.
Let me close my eyes now. I’m hearing now a long match struck against the matchbox by my mother—ptch—then the flames of the pincers as orange and yellow as the polluted Leningrad sunset, then the whoosh of air being sucked out as if by a neutron bomb, just like the one the American imperialists are threatening on television to use against us, then the sting of the warm glass against my back. And then ten minutes of lying as still as a dead October leaf at the bottom of a pool, lest the banki pop off my tortured back and the whole procedure is to be repeated again.
The first step of our multipart emigration to America will involve a weeklong stop in Vienna, before we move on to Rome and, finally, New York. I will be six years old and breathless from asthma per the usual and will have to be taken to a Viennese medical clinic. Herr Doktor will take one look at my black-and-blue-bruised back and prepare to call the Austrian police forces with a fresh report of child abuse. After my parents nervously explain that it was merely “cupping,” he will laugh and say: “How old-fashioned!” or “How idiotic!” or “You crazy Russians, what will you do next, huh?” He will give me something I have never encountered back in the USSR: a simple steroid-fueled asthma inhaler. For the first time in my life, I will enjoy the realization that I do not have to choke to death every night.
Little Failure Page 5
