The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  Katya wants to buy everything, but we just don’t have the money. Of course, like all women, she refuses to hear any logic and is always foisting new American customs on me, which usually translates into spending more money. She says that Americans use three or four different kinds of shampoos on their hair, and has forced me to do the same. Garik, our neighbor, says Americans take showers very seriously, and if your armpits have a natural odor, you could get fired from your job. One cannot account for all their mishugas, but I have Katya smell me before I leave for work every morning, just in case. Katya says we are getting too fat and dull, that we don’t look like ourselves anymore. I blame it on a spectacular place called McDonalds. The potatoes are to die for, and they serve their katletta with cheese melted on top.

  The best news of all is that I just got a job as an accountant for 19 thousand dollars a year! All the other Russians are going into computers, but I’m shooting for the stars. Speaking of stars, I hear through the grapevine that dentists make millions here. Can you believe it, Semeyon, I used to make 1300 rubles a year as a dentist? I can’t imagine what people do with all that money.

  “There is black tar,” my mother whispered, “over the next five lines.”

  “Lana says her letters are practically blacked out. They’re censoring everyone these days,” Grandmother said.

  “They’re not censoring enough!” my father spat.

  “What’s at the end?” I asked, trying to stave off another parental scuffle.

  We send all our love, and two pairs of jeans for the girls,

  We kiss you, Yakov, Katya, and Valeryi.

  My mother re-read this letter to the family like a religious chant to convince us that our future lay elsewhere—in this strange magical world we had been programmed from youth to hate. But the letter did not weaken my father’s resistance; it only fortified it. “What did I tell you,” he’d yell, “all he writes about is money.” Staring accusingly at my mother, he’d say, “And where is there any mention of your precious freedom?”

  But in 1978, after I had returned from the Camp for Intellectuals, I took to bed. An illness overtook me whose only symptoms were fatigue, a loss of appetite, and an inexplicable apathy to schoolwork. I, the straight-A high achiever, activities enthusiast, winner of numerous poetry and art awards, and the chief star in the school’s theatrical production of Pioneers Take Over the World, complained of a headache so severe that it ruined my concentration and humiliated me in front of Lenin, our omniscient, red-headed God. After highly regarded doctors prescribed the infallible treatment of tea with honey, vitamin C powders, and raw eggs taken three times a day, and still there was no improvement, my mother was forced to consider the one diagnosis that had no name in Mother Russia: depression.

  My father bought a sketchpad for me, a gift from the black market with small letters engraved at the top. It said Dlya Hudozhnika, For the Artist. “You have an excellent eye for human faces,” my father told me. “Perhaps if you draw your thoughts, you’ll feel better.” With a single black pen, I began to draw the faces, faces jutting from black shadows, monsters lit against the sun, eyes alive, untethered, floating, from normalcy to chaos, from black chaos into calm.

  My mother knew enough about the monsters in the white birch forest to realize that the Camp for Intellectuals had become my nightmare, my indelible Russian scar. But what I told her and Grandmother and Father and Bella that day, when they demanded with typical Soviet zeal to know “everything,” would become my mother’s scar as well. There had been other incidents before this one—some troubling, others mere manifestations of the everyday fare of being a Jew in Russia—but none invaded my mother’s soul as pervasively as the one that marked the summer of 1978 at that camp. The final disaster, as we came to call it in the family, convinced my mother that to remain in Russia would be an act of great cowardice and inhumanity to her children. She never spoke of it again, perhaps because it was unbearable to repeat it, but when my mother uttered the word “anti-Semitism,” I knew she was referring specifically to what happened to me.

  I was afraid of my mother during those years. She was not a particularly tall or heavy woman, but there was so much air and power in her gait that one had to step aside to give her room to pass. When she smiled, it was at once a moment of relief and pleasure, as though you had been doused in warm, perfumed water. She worked at one of Moscow’s prestigious literary establishments as an editor, censoring poetry and novels, while secretly typing an anti-Soviet manuscript—part poem, part manifesto—she kept hidden in my room. And while her face had the large, thin, aristocratic features long associated with writers, she was wonderfully voluptuous and her skin melted under your fingers like smooth white velvet: the “perfect woman,” many men had said. Yet when she became angry, walls and carpets and parquet floors seemed to grow angry, too, and I often wondered as a child whether the sky itself, with its darkening clouds and elusive sun, reflected my mother’s moods. Her fury was indignant and pure, a typhoon rising up her neck into her nostrils and unfurling at the top of her lustrous, russet-colored head. One inevitably felt that she was right.

  When my father still appeared to be in the throes of indecision about whether or not to apply for an exit visa, my mother called him a festering glob of mucus without balls and my father, for his part, demoted her to a yelping bitch doomed to wag her tail in fantasy all her life. These two insults captured the gist of all their protracted, foul-mouthed, foot-stomping, document-throwing fights. My parents’ quarrels became more vitriolic and physically demanding with each passing month that saw my father gather application documents and then hide them from my mother. They blamed each other for my suffering, and broke two porcelain plates, three gold-rimmed shot glasses, and one Chinese vase along the way. My mother battled paralyzing migraines, and my father complained of numbness in the right side of his face and pain in his lower back. Yet despite these ominous symptoms or perhaps because of them, my father finally caved in under the great force that was my mother, the sort of force an ordinary man like him could not have withstood, and the question itself—whether to apply—ended on May 15, 1980, when my father put all the required documents in the mailbox. On that day, we entered the official state of limbo, and the interminable wait began. By then, Russia was at war with Afghanistan, America had boycotted the Russian Olympics, and the iron door had practically slammed shut. Every day Jews were receiving rejections, acquiring a new status known as “refuseniks,” people forced to remain in Russia as official traitors, people with packed suitcases and sold furniture and no jobs and lost hope. We weren’t them yet, but we were late bloomers, truants playing high-stakes durak with our lives.

  My father was a professor of mathematics at Moscow State University, a position so difficult for a Jew to obtain and keep that he felt at thirty-eight he had reached the pinnacle of his career, and that from this point on he could only slide downward. He had published extensively, was lovingly dubbed “Jew-genius” among his colleagues, and even had visits from government officials for consultations. Although he protested against America on the grounds that he did not want to abandon his mother in Kiev, everyone in the family suspected that my father was equally loath to leave his illustrious career. The university atmosphere was so saturated with recruits from the KGB that once the documents had been mailed, my father had no choice but to announce his resignation.

  That same day he plunged into an abysmal depression. He moped around the apartment, pretended to study English, and played cards with my grandfather, downing vodka like a goy. Eventually, to make money, he began tutoring children in math as an underground operation—the underground being the bedroom he shared with my mother. Private practice was illegal, and the fear of being discovered caused my father to develop a slight tremor in his right leg, one that he would carry with him to America as a kind of strange memento.

  My father was a mild-mannered thinker who suffered from too much contemplation and had a quiet, snorting laugh. When he did get angry,
he also shook but with a nervous twitch that made you suspect he was hiding something. Rather than fearing him, we usually felt sorry for him and wished for his outburst to subside and leave him in peace, primarily because he was blessed with a calm, handsome face and his wrath invariably contorted his otherwise perfect features. Although some people considered their cumulative beauty to be proof that good looks bring one success in life, for my mother and father it ended up being a curse.

  My father’s forlorn brown eyes, strong aquiline nose, and high contemplative forehead attracted swarms of women. They advanced on my father like royal knights about to attack, their tits in metal armor pressing into his tender flesh in my mother’s presence. One was at once entertained and disgusted by their roaming hands, their veiled sexual laughter and cleverly constructed compliments—the sort one’s wife could never in good conscience make. With one touch, one lick of a lip, one inviting glance, they made adultery meaningless and yet somehow full of suffering and soul. They were the beacons of tradition, the torchbearers of Russia’s romanticization of adultery. And since the sexual consummation of adultery was not nearly as important as the act of stealing a spouse from his or her nest, married couples were always in high demand. Married men and women were almost unanimously disillusioned, hungry for any crumb of romance, determined to recreate their youthful ambition of loving passionately, wildly, and unreservedly the way aristocrats loved in the time of Pushkin and Tolstoy; they too were destined to be Anna Kareninas and Vronskys (without, of course, the ensuing suicide).

  So it often happened that one of my mother’s married girlfriends would settle in my father’s lap, squeeze his temples, and play joyously with his curly yellow hair. Although my father had two thinning spots on his head that shone brightly under lamps, women never minded. Looks were not a requirement for men in the easy business of committing adultery, and my father had more looks to offer than most men. But like most men, my father could never send the women away—I can think of at least three that pressed their breasts into his nose in my very presence—because he suffered from a perverse politeness, even though he could see, through the back of his skull, blood igniting my mother’s pale face. He could anticipate within milliseconds of the offending woman’s departure when the screaming would begin. His only defense would be a mild-voiced murmur: “What was I supposed to do—beat her till she got off my lap?” “My dearest mudila,” my mother would begin, “there are so many polite approaches at your disposal, like asking the woman where her husband is, or declaring that you adore your wife and your wife—your wife—is the most gorgeous woman in the room!” “That’s for you women to squabble over,” my father would chuckle maliciously. “Oh, I see! Then might I suggest popping her forehead!” At which point my mother would press her thumb and middle finger together and make a loud snap against my father’s head. “You ungrateful coward—you perfidious traitor!” she’d rail. But my father felt helpless in the face of these straying women. Or perhaps he harbored hidden pleasures at the attention he received. For if you considered the matter closely, you would see how deeply my father enjoyed goading my mother. My mother’s anger and jealousy calmed his nerves, lifted him into the echelons of power, gave him an exaggerated sense of his own virility and value as a man. Her jealousy was the one thing he held over her. Her jealousy was the one moment between them when he did not have to feel stifled by the righteous wind in her lungs.

  But at Lana Rubin’s going-away party, at the height of his mind-compressing depression, my father latched on to one woman with particularly large breasts, a pudgy upturned nose, and badly colored blonde hair. She laughed at all his jokes, even when he wasn’t making any, stroked his head in that soft manner women adopt when they envision themselves as mistresses, and pressed her oversized breasts into his nose to help him orient himself in the world. But worst of all, she was married to one of our relatives, on my mother’s side, which gave this situation a most unsavory flavor, the sort that always ruins a good yarn about infidelity. To have bleached frizzy hair and be related, to wear so much cheap perfume that we could taste it on our tongues and be related, to have pockmarks on her cheeks that were badly concealed by Russia’s defective powders and be related, that riled my mother more than the actual concept of her husband having an affair. The very image of the two fornicating nauseated my mother, and at night, we could hear her vomiting in our toilet. But my grandmother pointed out that my father needed a woman inferior to himself, that it was Djenna’s inferiority that made her so sweetly appealing and drove my poor father into her bulbous arms, that man’s insecurity was the principal cause of adultery, which in turn convinced the man that he was blameless and that it was his wife’s fault, after all, that he was fucking her third cousin-in-law.

  My mother responded to this smirch on her dignity by taking herself a lover. This lover happened to be a student of my father’s from the university, one of the few loyal souls who still admired my father and was a frequent guest at our dinner parties. He was a decade younger than my mother, and while my father was finely sculpted in face and thin in body, the lover was bulky and coarse, a round-faced, pink-cheeked young man with a loud, infectious laugh and dazzling green eyes. A chazar, Grandmother called him, a goy—my mother’s adolescent rebellion. But unlike my father, my mother fell deeply, irrevocably in love. She became chirpy, frighteningly energetic, and visibly shinier, as though love was the very cause of grease in your T-zone. Her skin glistened in the sun or under a warm lamp, heightening the perfection of her features, and at the same time making one want to dab her with a handkerchief. Her expressions acquired a new vibrancy and impatience with the world, as though she were flying off somewhere and people took too long to finish their sentences. The anger receded into some imperceptible corner of her mouth that would twitch and then not be seen again. At the same time, she took up smoking, started drinking more, and her hands trembled from an escalating nervousness that forced her to put glasses or plates down until she could regain her composure. For a while Bella and I supposed it was the stress of having to wait for the government’s permission slip, but eventually through eavesdropping we learned the truth.

  Bella and I were always spying on the adults. Their lives seemed to us full of glamor and decadence: parties that lasted into the morning hours, rows of vodka and champagne bottles, plates overflowing with caviar and herring and vobla, lovers lurking in darkened corners, talented fingers of some engineer or physicist strumming on a guitar, operatic voices of perfectly sculpted women who dreamed of being on stage, dancing that erupted after midnight and shook our parquet floors until the sun settled in the sky. It was this incessant humming, the constant pulse of a world that never slept—a world we could not yet inhabit but only observe from doorways perched on our father’s shoulders—that kept us awake at night and gave our imaginations undue freedom. Between the two of us, we knew almost everything, collecting in our large bag of adult secrets their fights, their jealousies, their sins. What Bella missed because she was taller, older, and more visible than me, I seized with my small eyes and ears. With the double affair in our house, it was impossible not to feel tension coiling round our necks like Stalin’s phantom hand waiting to suffocate us all. But when our parents passed each other in the hallway, their heads cocked in affected disgust, they remained civil and orderly, never daring to confront one another in the open. This heroism was quietly commended by all their friends: Look at the Kabelmachers, they would say, they have problems but they wisely keep them to themselves. It was distinctly Russian wisdom.

  My mother and grandmother spoke of my mother’s affair in strained voices, whispers broken by shrieks, percolating our narrow halls with a current of nervous desperation. One morning on my way to breakfast, I heard Grandmother Zinayida say, “You have to end it! I don’t care what it costs you—I’m sick and tired of your feelings!”

  My mother, who rarely let out a tear, was weeping.

  “Do you want to stay here?” Grandmother yelled, her face turn
ing mauve. “Leave your children in this country after what Lenochka went through—”

  “You have to understand, Mother, I never intended it, never!”

  “Oh, you intended it all right,” Grandmother said, “but now it seems like you’ve forgotten who you are, what your purpose in life is! I can understand a few months, a few nights, but this has gone on for over a year, and you’re starting to scare me, Sonichka. Are you getting serious with him? He’s a student, a green-faced child—what can he offer you?”

  “He’s so smart and ambitious—he’ll have a brilliant career in the States—”

  “You’re going to ask for a divorce?” Grandmother lowered her voice as though someone was about to be arrested. “Have you lost your mind—have you forgotten that you have children?”

  “The children will come with me—with, with us, and you’ll come with us,” my mother whimpered, looking beseechingly at my grandmother.

  “No,” my grandmother shot back, her glare like a spear glistened between them. “If you do that, Semeyon will stay here in Russia and ask for his old job back. And don’t think he won’t try to keep the children here, with him, with his mother—it’s too much of a risk—besides, he’s a good father, despite everything.”

  “He started all this,” my mother snapped.

  “All men are the same in this respect,” Grandmother noted reassuringly, “but he’ll leave her—she hasn’t made a dent on him. He needs her now because you’ve been too hard on him—you’ve always been too much! But look at what this has done to you—you’re a wreck!”