Little Failure
Page 9
And then another Soviet plane, the water-bug-shaped, propeller-driven Ilyushin-18, bellies up to the terminal, and I am excited by the thought of a second plane ride in one day, even if instead of the Soviet carrier Aeroflot, its logo a hammer and sickle bracketed by a pair of enormous goose-like wings, we are seated within an East German airliner with the ugly name of Interflug and no Communist coat of arms to speak of. I am strapped in; the plane takes off for a very short (and loud and droning) flight south. Momentarily, we will land in a world unlike any we could have imagined, the one many will tell us is free.
But nothing is free.
Vienna. To this day passing through its fancy international airport is bittersweet. This is the first stop on what is becoming a regular three-part journey for Soviet Jews. First, Vienna, then Rome, then an English-Speaking Country Elsewhere. Or, for the true believers, Israel.
In addition to my Moscow Olympics pin and my homage to my tigr, a worn Soviet atlas accompanies me to Vienna. I love maps. With their longitudes crossing latitudes at precise ninety-degree angles, with the topographical yellows of the African veldt and the pale caviar grays of the Caspian Sea, maps will help make sense of the world spinning relentlessly beneath our feet.
The customs area at VIE is a madhouse of Russian immigrants collecting their worldly possessions. One of our swollen army-green sacks happens to burst in transit, spilling out one hundred kilograms of red compasses with yellow hammers and sickles that, unbeknownst to me, we are going to sell to Communist Italians. As Mama and Papa crawl on all fours trying to gather their wares, yobtiki mat’, yobtiki mat’, I subdue my sweaty worry by carefully tracing the frosty expanses of Greenland in my atlas—cold, cold, cold—rocking back and forth like a religious Jew. The first Western person I have ever seen, a middle-aged Austrian woman in a dappled fur coat, sees me davening over my maps. She elegantly steps over my parents and hands me a Mozart chocolate candy. She smiles at me with eyes the color of Lake Neusiedl, one of the largest in Austria according to my map of Central Europe. If I believe in anything now, it is in the providence of that woman.
But here is another thing that I see: My parents are on their knees. We are in a foreign country, and my parents are on the floor trying to gather the flimsy goods that are to sustain us through our journey.
On that night, we are “safe” in the West. We are staying in a Viennese rooming house called Pan Bettini, which is also being used by the local prostitutes. “Such classy prostitutes!” my mother exclaims. “They ride on bikes. They dress so subtly.”
“I know I’m not allowed chocolate,” I say, “but can I eat the Mozart candy? I’ll save the wrapper for later. It will be my toy.”
“Listen, little son,” my father says. “I can tell you a secret. We are going to America.”
I cannot breathe. He hugs me.
Or maybe it should be: He hugs me. I cannot breathe.
Either way, we are going to the enemy.
Christmas is coming to Vienna, and few cities take the holiday as seriously. Papa and I are walking down the broad Hapsburg boulevards lost to neon and red trim and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s thin-lipped visage and the occasional manger with its silent wooden Baby Jesus. In my thickly gloved hand I am holding my own Lord and Savior, an inhaler. My lungs are still swollen, the phlegm is rumbling inside, but the illness has been dealt a serious setback by that miracle of Western technology, courtesy of an ancient Viennese doctor whom my father has charmed with his broken German (“asthma über alles!”).
We are going to the enemy.
In my father’s hand a different kind of miracle, a banana. Who has ever heard of a banana in winter? But here in the Austrian capital, for less than a schilling, it is possible. The shopwindows are crammed with goods—vacuum cleaners with nozzles thin and powerful like the snouts of aardvarks; cutouts of tall, elegant women holding aloft jars of cream, their faces smiling like they mean it; models of healthy boys dressed haphazardly in ensembles of woolen caps, shockingly short winter jackets (but won’t these Austrian Jungen catch cold?), and gleaming corduroy pants. My father and I are walking mouths open, so that “a crow may fly in,” as the Russian saying goes. We have seen the Opera and the Wien Museum, but what has impressed us the most is the frighteningly fast black-and-yellow trams that zip us across town and to the Danube in minutes.
We are going to the enemy.
Here the first moral quandary sets in. The Viennese trams operate on the honor system. Do we use the few schillings we have to buy a ticket, or do we take advantage of the West’s generosity and buy more bananas? A source of much discussion, but in the end Papa decides that we better not upset the Austrians. Or you-know-what might happen again. All around us late-model Mercedeses sweep the gaily illuminated streets, lit to within an inch of daylight. There are thousands of us Soviet Jews stomping our way through Christmas Vienna that night, mouths agape, letting the pleasure and the horror of home-leaving finally wash over all of us, wondering if we really should have paid for that tram ticket. In our hotels, we have all been confronted with the shelf in the bathroom, containing not just one but two spare rolls of toilet paper. Before such magnificence our collective Soviet ethics yield. We grab the spare toilet paper and stuff it into the most sacred parts of our luggage, edging out all those degrees in mechanical engineering.
We are going to the enemy.
Holding our asthma inhaler and banana before us, my father and I walk up the stairs to our room in the Hotel for Prostitutes, where Mother is chastely waiting for us.
She bends down to my level to make sure the scarf has been tied correctly around my neck (any gaps, and my father will get it). “Are you breathing okay?” she asks me. Yes, Mama. I have my new inhaler.
Then to my father, “A banana! How can it be?” And not just that, my father tells her, throwing a whole bunch of bananas on the table and then reaching into his sack. They have marinated gherkins in jars. And also a powdered mushroom soup from a brand called Knorr. I look at the clear bright package on which the Knorr Corporation has drawn a cadre of herb-dotted mushrooms boiling themselves silly inside an octagonal bowl, and next to them an artist’s rendering of the actual ingredients: the saucy little mushrooms before they were thrown into the water and all the high-level vegetables that are just creaming to jump in alongside them.
My parents are in rapture over the marinated gherkins in jars.
I am in rapture over the Knorr soup, although I tell myself not to get too excited. We are going to the enemy.
“Eat, eat, little one,” my mother says. “While it’s hot, so that it can bring up the phlegm.”
“Decent soup, but not like ours back home,” my father says. “Real white mushrooms from the forest near Leningrad cooked in butter, and then you make the soup with sour cream and with lots of garlic. There’s nothing better!”
Already, the nostalgia. And the echoes of Soviet patriotism. But somehow this little packet of Knorr has produced enough mushroom soup to feed three refugees. Now there is only one thing to do. To peel the bananas and have an outrageous fruit dessert in the middle of December! One banana each, into our hungry refugee mouths, and tphoo!
“They are rotten! You’ve bought rotten bananas!”
We are going to the enemy.
The second part of the journey begins. The Israeli representatives have begged my parents to change their minds and get on an El Al flight straight to the Holy Land, where we can all be BIG JEWS together and stand up for ourselves (“Never Again!”) against our enemies in their checkered Arafat-style thingies, but my parents have courageously resisted. The letters from their relatives in New York have been emphatic, if cliché: “The streets here are paved with gold. We can sell leather jackets at the flea market.” Now we are boarding a series of trains that will take us to Rome and, from there, to one of the powerhouse English-speaking countries in desperate need of Soviet engineers, America or South Africa, say. The two army-green sacks and the trio of orange suitcases made out of real
Polish leather are harnessed once more. We are on a cozy European train eating ham sandwiches and boring our way through the Alps to finally emerge on the other side. And then something inexplicable begins to happen. By which I mean: Italy.
My aunt Tanya’s belief that one of our ancestors, the magnificent Prince Suitcase, was the tsar’s representative to Venice may bear out in the end. Because once we reach Italy we become different people (although who doesn’t?). As the train rumbles southward, I take out my atlas and trace our journey topographically past the brown ridges of the Ligurian Alps, over the spine of the Apennines, and into darkest water-fed green. Green? Sure, we’ve encountered that color in Leningrad whenever the summer’s heat would disturb the winter snows for a month or two, but who could imagine green on this scale? And alongside the green, past the country’s boot-shaped boundaries, the deep blue of … Sredizemnoye More, the Mediterranean. And, fuck your mother, it’s December, but the sun is shining with atomic strength, shining early and bright in the winter morning, as our train pulls into Roma Termini, a train station of enormous fascist span, which, to borrow from my future best friend Walt Whitman, contains multitudes: a noisy mélange of Russians, Italians, and Gypsies, each with their own rallying cry. Yes, there will be bananas here. Better bananas. And tomatoes nurtured by the motherly figure of the Italian sun. Tomatoes that explode in the mouth like grenades.
One is cautioned by the better critics never to write about photographs. They are an easy substitute for prose, a hackneyed shortcut, and, besides, they lie like all images do. So what am I to make of the photo of my small family—Mama and Papa and me between them—sitting on a worsted blanket in a chipped, dingy apartment in Ostia, a seaside suburb of Rome? My father has his arm around my mother’s shoulder, and my love is divided between his knee and her cheekbone. She is in a turtleneck and a knee-length skirt, smiling with all of her remarkably natural (for a Soviet émigrée) white teeth. He, in a white shirt and jeans, with his prominent Adam’s apple, his Italian-black goatee and sideburns, is beaming in a more restrained way for the camera, the lower lip, usually set in an unhappy position, be it sadness or anger, dragooned into happiness. And between them I am rosy cheeked, aflame with health and joy. I am still the owner of the same stupid Soviet polka-dot shirt, but most of it is hidden by a new Italian sweater, its shoulders ringed with something like epaulets, so that I may continue the fantasy that I will join the Red Army someday. My hair is as long and unruly as the Italian state, and the gap between my crooked teeth is its own opera, but the rings under my eyes that have made such an underaged raccoon out of me are gone. My mouth is open and, through the gap in my teeth, I am breathing in mouthfuls of the warm, ennobling Roman air. This photo is the first indication I have of all three of us together happy, ecstatic, as a family. If I may go so far, it is the first anecdotal evidence I have that joy is possible and that a family can love each other with as much abandon as it can muster.
Five months in Rome!
We are mostly at leisure. Our pastel apartment is crumbling but cheap, rented from a small but budding Odessa mafioso, who will soon seek greener pastures in Baltimore. Our days are filled with churches and museums, Colosseums and Vaticans, and, on Sundays, the Porta Portese market in Trastevere, a rambunctious, nearly Balkan bazaar by a bend in the Tiber River. My father, a so-so mechanical engineer and unfulfilled singer (“How they used to applaud me when I sang!”), has been readying for America by becoming a minor businessman. The American Jews, guilty over their inaction during the Holocaust, have been exceedingly kind to their Soviet brethren, and most of our five-month wait in Rome—our application for refugee status in the United States is still being processed—is generously paid for by their gathered funds. But Papa has bigger ideas! Each week we pack an army-green sack with Soviet crap bound for Porta Portese. There are stacks of green East German sheet music for symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Why Italians would want to buy such artifacts is now beyond me, but it is almost as if my father, not fully convinced of the journey ahead, is saying, I am a worthy person who has lived for forty cultured years on this earth. I am not just some Cold War loser. He also sells a samovar to a kind Italian couple, an engineer and a music teacher, a mirror image of my father and mother, and they invite us to bowls of spaghetti so dense we become confused by the gluttony. How can anyone eat so much food? In America, we will see how.
Before we left Leningrad, the émigré party line has informed us of an interesting quirk. While half of the Eastern Bloc would likely get up and move to Missouri if given the chance, the crazy Italians can’t get enough of communism. They can even get pretty violent about it. The newspapers are still screaming about the Brigate Rosse, the Red Brigades, and how an industrialist’s son had recently been kidnapped and had part of his ear cut off. Still, business is business, and anything Russian is huge. A fat big-bosomed former prostitute from Odessa stalks the beaches of our seaside Ostia, shouting, “Prezervatiff! Prezervatiff!” as she peddles Soviet condoms to the amorous locals. Given their poor quality, I wonder how many inadvertent future Italians owe their existence to her wares. Meanwhile, our neighbor, a timid Leningrad doctor, ventures out to the pier with a bale of Soviet heart medicine. “Medicina per il cuore!” he croons. The local police think he’s peddling heroin and pull out their pistole. The timid doctor, all glasses and big bald dome, runs off as the police fire warning shots after him. He is unwilling to let go of the giant umbrella he has used to shield himself from the warm Italian rain. The sight of the Jewish doctor and the umbrella escaping down the Mediterranean coast with the carabinieri in tow warms our hearts and provides endless conversations over the cheap chicken liver that constitutes most of our diet. (The prized tomatoes and balls of mozzarella are for once a week only.)
I am given a more lucrative, and more legal, sales line: compasses emblazoned with the yellow hammer and sickle against a red background. At Porta Portese, I walk around the perimeter of the bed-sheet that defines our stake, brandishing a sample compass and hollering at passersby with my now-healthy little boy’s lungs, “Mille lire! Mille lire!” A thousand lire, less than a dollar, is what each of the compasses costs, and the Italians, they are not animals. They see a poor refugee boy in a polka-dot-vertical-striped shirt, they will give him a thousand lire. “Grazie mille! Grazie mille!” I reply as the money is thrust in one hand and a little piece of Russia leaves another.
I am allowed to hang on to some of those mille lire notes, Giuseppe Verdi’s bewhiskered punim winking back at me from the currency. My obsession is guidebooks. Cheap English guidebooks, their spines a glob of glue and some string, with encompassing names like All Rome and All Florence and All Venice. I set up a little treasure chest of books in the tiny room we share in Ostia, and I try to read them in English, with limited success. The English-Russian dictionary is introduced to my world, along with the new non-Cyrillic alphabet. And then the words: “oculus,” baldacchino, “nymphaeum.” “Papa, what does this mean?” “Mama, what does that mean?” Oh, the pain of having an inquisitive child.
The American Jews are now flinging money at us with abandon (three hundred U.S. dollars a month!), the hammer-and-sickle compasses are really paying off, so we use the proceeds to take guided bus tours of Florence and Venice and everything in between. Brimming with All Florence knowledge I interrupt the lackadaisical Russian tour guide at the Medici Chapel. “Excuse me,” my nerdish voice rings out across the marble. “I believe you are not correct, Guide. That is Michelangelo’s Allegory of Night. And this is the Allegory of Day.”
Silence. The guide consults his literature. “I believe the boy is right.”
A rustle in the midst of the Russian refugees, a dozen doctors and physicists and piano geniuses among them. “That boy knows everything!” And then, most important, to my mother, “A delightful child. How old is he?”
I am lapping it up. “Six. Almost seven.”
“Remarkable!”
Mother hugs me. Mother loves me.
The American Jews are paying for us, but the Christians are not content to let entire herds of confused, post-Communist Jews just wander past. There is a Christian center nearby, which we call the Amerikanka, in honor of the American Baptists who run it. They bait us in with some dried meat and noodles, only to show us a full-color film about their God. A reckless, know-it-all hippie motorcyclist is lost amid the Sahara Desert, he runs out of water, and, just as he is about to die, Jesus comes over to dispense precious water and career advice. The production values are terrific. In the bathroom of our flat I cradle the Madonna del Granduca. “I just saw your Son in the film, Santa Maria. He was bleeding so much. Oh, my poor Madonnachka.”
The next week the workers at the local Jewish organization decide to up the ante. They screen Fiddler on the Roof.