by Masha Gessen
Not to mention that Sasha is too young to marry. She suspects he may still be a virgin. If he marries Yolochka now, he will never find his own way as a man. And if he will not be reasoned with, maybe Ruzya can make her daughter see the sense of what Ester is saying. Yolochka, after all, cannot be all that serious about taking away Ester’s son.
Ester holds little back as she describes the situation to Ruzya over the other woman’s green Formica kitchen table. Ruzya brews tea the way each of them likes it—a cup of boiling hot, so-strong-it-is-black liquid for her friend, a cup of lukewarm golden-colored liquid for herself—and listens quietly.
Ruzya has always envied the confidence with which Ester parents. She is unshakable in her conviction not just that she is right but that her children are always right too. Ruzya’s own suspicion that she is generally mistaken only gets amplified when she thinks of her child. And it doubles back on itself, making her think of all the things she has done wrong. At night, thinking of the baby Yolochka is carrying, Ruzya tallies up the wrongs and makes resolutions. She never should have made it her business to track down all those reading halls and cancel Yolochka’s subscriptions. She should not have left her with her grandmother and the rest of the relatives in the old apartment when Yolochka was fifteen and Ruzya herself went to live with Semyon. She should not have threatened to disown her two years later, when Yolochka said she was going to marry an insulting, insane artist. And she should not have said “I told you so” when that union cracked predictably soon. She should not have made a production over Yolochka’s expulsion from college over—of all things—her failure to attend physical education classes. She should always have presumed her daughter to be right, just as Ester does.
She reminds herself of this as she listens to Ester. She objects, of course; she speaks of the unborn child, of the love that surprised her. But she knows Ester must be right, as she usually is in matters of parenting. She promises she will talk with Yolochka. She will put another measure of distance between herself and her faraway girl.
Ruzya did relay Ester’s request—that she not marry her son—to Yolochka, who never forgot it. She could hold grudges, and this one she held against both her mother and her mother-in-law.
As soon as winter began, Ruzya talked her into joining her and Ester and several other friends on a cross-country skiing trip. Yolochka fell, hard, and miscarried that night. She told her mother it was all her fault.
Still, she and Sasha did not change their wedding plans. They were married on March 26, 1966. Nine and a half months later, I was born. I was a difficult child in every respect: born premature, I was sickly through my teenage years; very precocious, I was painfully withdrawn with both peers and family—with the sole exception of Ruzya, at whose house I spent many weekends and vacations. At the ages of twenty-four and twenty-two, my parents were hardly ready for parenthood, especially for severely challenging parenthood. I left home at fifteen, angry at them for sins real and imagined, and we did not make real peace until I was in my mid-twenties. My brother, Kostya, born eight years after me, was, while no less talented, a joy for his parents and his grandmothers and an easy and well-done parenting job.
My parents’ temperaments—my father’s stubborn stoicism and my mother’s histrionic swings—made for a difficult match. For the first fifteen years of their marriage they fought frequently, shamelessly, at the top of their lungs. But they never seriously considered separating, except once, about seven years after they married. That time Ester intervened, more in the interest of truth than in the interest of keeping them together: “You may find a wife who is better-looking,” she told her son. “You will definitely find one who is easier to get along with. But life with any other woman after Yolochka will bore you.” They stayed together.
By that standard, theirs was a heavenly match. They read and learned, together and apart. They raised two children. They changed professions. They emigrated. They switched roles within the marriage. They could have kept at it forever. My parents were together for twenty-six years, until my mother’s death in 1992.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JUNE 1978
Ruzya must have taken this walk about a thousand times. She has been living in the idyllic little town of Dubna for just over three years, ever since she married Alik, a nuclear physicist. Semyon died in 1971. Their fourteen-year marriage had proved no refuge from the overwrought ways of her own family. Soon after they were married Ruzya realized Semyon could not stop at the three shots of vodka that made him a brilliant conversationalist. He drank secretively, whenever and wherever he could, morning and night. Empty bottles clinked whenever Ruzya opened or shut the closet door. Semyon deteriorated slowly until finally, when he could no longer work, he consented to treatment. His doctor used a strong medication, and Semyon’s heart failed: he had been sober about two weeks when he died of a heart attack.
A couple of years after Semyon’s death an old friend named Sara promised to set Ruzya up with someone named Alik, a recently divorced and therefore eminently eligible physicist and mountain climber, but Alik had ruled her out on the basis of age: he, at fifty-six, was counting on a young woman. Ruzya then met him accidentally, on a mountain-climbing trip—it was an even smaller world up there—and kept their romance secret until the wedding. She asked Sara to be a witness at the wedding without telling her whom she was marrying. She was making a point.
The point was there to be made. Once the wedding was scheduled, she became something of a celebrity among a small circle of women translators. She was doing research for a translation at Yolochka’s place of work, the Foreign Literature Library—her daughter had worked there since graduating from college—and the door of the reading room opened at regular intervals: a woman’s head, different each time, would show in the opening and disappear: everyone wanted a peek at The Woman Who Is Getting Hitched at Fifty-four.
It was, in addition to love and luck and that surprising sense of inevitability that makes a marriage between two adults suddenly a necessity—aside from all that, it was a personal triumph. Ruzya had always known how to squeeze every possible bit of happiness out of the worst of circumstances, but with Alik’s arrival, she realized how hard she had had to work at it the last ten years: Semyon’s drinking and then his death, followed by the zigzagging of Boba, her old friend and now lover, tortured by his inability to leave his wife, had relegated her to the world of small but passionate joys; her contentment with Alik is broad, stable, and generalized. After the wedding they moved into his studio apartment here: her work can be done anywhere, while he is tied to his lab. Dubna, just a couple of hours outside of Moscow, is a small town of yellow two- and four-story apartment buildings, surrounded by a pine forest. She and Alik make a nightly ritual of praising the air while they take a walk in the woods, to the Dubna River and back. She loves these strolls, which remind her that moving to Dubna—where the apartment is cramped and so is their social circle—was about love and beauty.
Today she is taking the walk alone, early in the morning: she is on her way to see her visitors—Yolochka, Sasha, and their children. This is the first time since Ruzya moved here that her daughter has brought her entire family to visit. Ruzya and Alik’s apartment is too small to house all of them, and the hotel demands the sort of connections and money they do not have, so they have set up a tent in the woods by the river, a half hour’s walk from Ruzya’s building. Ruzya walks fast, as she always does, though she realizes Yolochka and her family may not even have woken up yet: they rise late, and this is just one way in which their lifestyle is mysterious to her. She feels the usual joy laced with anxiety at the thought of seeing Yolochka, and the tiny threat of jealousy at having to share her grandchildren with their parents. Since she moved here she has had Masha come and stay with her every vacation, and the baby, Kostya, has been sent to stay with her a few times as well. Alik, who has no grandchildren of his own, strains to conceal his discomfort in the presence of small children, but their visits are the only tim
es when Ruzya really feels at home in Alik’s town and his apartment.
“Grandma, Grandma, stop!” Three-and-a-half-year-old Kostya is shouting and running from the tent. “Don’t come down until I help you!”
He runs up the short but steep incline that leads to the tent and extends his tiny arm gallantly up to his grandma. How did her distant daughter with her careening marriage ever produce such a perfect child? Their older one is a prickly girl, sometimes affectionate, often withdrawn, and always perceptibly alone. But the boy, round-faced and dark-haired, is genuinely happy and evenly open to the world.
He gets her down to the tent and offers her a chair, a gimmicky and uncomfortable folding number: she will never understand the way these two spend money. Their messy apartment has no real furniture, just bare-bones bookshelves from floor to ceiling—and here they have splurged on a set of camping furniture. They could at least have bought a proper camping stove instead: Sasha is now fiddling with a jerry-rigged contraption they use for cooking while Yolochka waits, holding a blackened aluminum pot by its long handle. Ruzya starts talking to them, and the conversation, like all their conversations, finds its way to their future, the question of whether they plan to set themselves up in a more stable manner, which, in her mind, has become synonymous with whether Sasha will ever finish his dissertation. That would mean more money—his salary at the research institute would automatically go up—but, more important, it would mean he is a man of serious intentions, of at least minimal standing. Ruzya has been alternately teasing and nagging him about his dissertation for years. Last time he told her he had put something down on paper. This time Yolochka answers for him.
“We have found a different solution to this problem.”
Ruzya knows instantly what this means. At varying levels of awareness she has been dreading this moment for six years, ever since the government began allowing Jews to emigrate. Yolochka’s first husband had been among the first to take this exit, once and for all establishing emigration not as the stuff of rumor and dreams unfulfilled but as a possibility. Yolochka has occasionally brought up the subject since. Sasha used to show little interest, but that must have changed. All this flashes through her mind so quickly it is as though she had been preparing to hear just this news for a long time. Her first thought, and her first gesture, go to Masha, her gangly eleven-year-old granddaughter, who returns the look from under a mane of hopelessly tangled black hair and reaches in her ready but slightly misdirected way to meet the embrace.
“This means I might never see you again,” Ruzya says, pressing the girl’s head to her shoulder.
JUNE 1978
For Ester there are no tears, though she wishes they would come. Sasha told her calmly, almost matter-of-factly. The unfairness is strangling her. She will be left behind because she has failed.
“Why have I succeeded in bringing up my children as Jews but not as Zionists?” she asks Sergei at breakfast and again at supper and at bedtime, and he smiles a lost smile. “If only they wanted to go to Israel …”
She has said the same to Sasha and Yolochka, and they have smiled, knowing and dismissing: it is not up for discussion. They are going to America, and if she does not want to come, she will have to stay behind.
This is the third time. When former Polish citizens were first allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1946, she felt no pull. Where would she have gone? She was a woman from nowhere and she had no one, save for her mother. Her marriage to Boris was still too new then to think of leaving, and non-Polish spouses were not allowed to go along. She stayed.
She did not regret it exactly, but when the same door opened again in 1956, she wanted out. She had been through the anti-Semitic meat grinder of the late forties by then; that memory lived inside her and—she knew—it lived in every person in the country, Jewish or not, and this made her want to go to one place only: Israel. Boris would not let her—and Sasha swore never to forgive his father for that.
So in a way she knew he would leave eventually. She wanted him to—never more than that day almost exactly seventeen years ago when Sasha came home from his oral mathematics exam at the university’s physics department. If he can spare his own children that kind of humiliation, then, by God, he should go. But she also knows something else: there is only one guarantee that Sasha will not have to watch powerlessly, as she did, while his children discover that they were born to pain—and that is to go to Israel. They can say what they want about America, but it is not a Jewish state, and that means Jews are never fully safe. Should she be consoled by the fact that Sasha has not been hurt enough to realize this?
“Why won’t they listen to me and go to Israel?” she asks Sergei at bedtime.
“I don’t know, love,” he says. “I would.”
She knows this is true: Sergei, who gets restless at any talk of Jewishness, would go to Israel for her sake, for the sake of their young son, and for the satisfaction of finally leaving the country that robbed him of his youth. But she also knows it will not happen: at fifty-five and sixty-four, they are too old to pick up and move if their grown children are not willing to come, are in fact moving somewhere else altogether. Still, the knowledge that her husband would try to share her dream with her soothes her. She lies down next to him and turns and turns the variables of the future in her mind. Soon enough the thoughts close in on her again and she longs to crawl out of this skin or at least to cry, but she cannot.
The tears will come three years later, when Sasha, Yolochka, and the children do finally leave the country. The moment she returns from seeing them off at the airport she knows that she will never see her son or her grandchildren again: stripped of their citizenship for the desire to leave the country, they are now considered enemies of the Soviet state. They will never be allowed to visit again, and she will, of course, never be given an exit visa to visit them. She will cry for three days.
JUNE 1978
Odd, but for Ruzya the decision to stay has never been about the country. Some people torment themselves about the language, about staying inside a culture they love. Ruzya understands, and she can well imagine herself haunted by the loss of the familiar, but she has no experience of such loss or such fear. Still, she has always stayed. The first time she decided not to leave the country was in the hungry, cold year of 1946, when a school friend’s father proposed to marry her and take her to Germany. He was offering himself, a solid man of fifty, plus the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union, and he hoped that the sum of his parts would make him attractive enough. Ruzya was twenty-six and hoping for more. This was how she did not move to Dresden. Will she move to Boston now?
This would mean leaving Alik: as a nuclear physicist, he is a living repository of state secrets, and he will never be allowed to travel abroad. She thinks of her marriage and the years that preceded it. There was one person who was privy to the fact and the particulars of her relationship with Alik, and the relationship he finally displaced, and to all that pulled and spun and sometimes snapped in her life after Semyon’s death. This person was Yolochka, the daughter who had been so much the stranger as a child and who as an adult became Ruzya’s confidante. Ruzya needs her daughter; but does Yolochka need Ruzya?
What would life in Boston be like? She would be the perfect Russian grandmother, the one who lives to cook for her grandchildren and tries her child’s patience with her very presence. She can envision herself waiting for the children after school, worried if they are late and thrilling to their footsteps on the stairs (or would they live in a house in Boston, rather than an apartment—she has read about that, but it seems hard to imagine). Kostya is three; it will be over ten years before he longs to escape her attentions. Ten years is a long time.
What would happen to Alik? He would look for another wife. Oh, he loves Ruzya. Every time they have been apart he has written letters so full of longing, so extraordinary in each word’s struggle to connect his reality to hers, that just thinking of them makes her feel loved. And she always feels marri
ed, perhaps more married than she has ever felt in her life. Within months of starting to live together they developed a routine that she knows will stay essentially unchanged as long as they both are alive. He naps in the afternoons, and then they both work at home, he in the large room and she in the kitchen, where her typewriter has taken up residence atop the refrigerator. In the same kitchen she cooks three meals a day: he needs his hot meals. When he eats, he sometimes remembers, his voice filling with retroactive horror, the way he had to eat in the cafeteria when he was between marriages. She hates it when he talks about how much he needs a wife. But, of course, it is true: he needs her. He needs her.
She will not go to Boston.
She will never doubt that decision.
FEBRUARY 18, 1981
For the most exquisitely torturous part they line up along a waist-high chrome barrier. For the next hour they can see their children but they can no longer touch them or talk to them. They can hear bits of the conversation between them and the customs official, a huge woman in a dark blue uniform who subjects all of their possessions to a thorough examination. She pauses over children’s drawings, brassieres, cigarette packs. Kostya, jumping up to be seen over the woman’s booth, declares, “I have gold!” She asks to see it in a tone of condescension but with a glint in her eye. He produces a scrap of tinsel and the morning’s only smile. “You are golden,” the customs officer says.
