The TV weather report, set to a bittersweet pop tune, would last an eternity. In Uzbekistan, a sunny twenty degrees centigrade. In Kamchatka, a snowstorm. Leningrad region, intermittent precipitation. Vast was our Socialist Rodina!
How could I ever confess to my parents that I felt secret pangs of pride at this vastness? That it stung me now, the thought of going to bed for the rest of my life not knowing if it was going to rain in the Urals?
I went into my room and unfolded my school uniform. It was too small. A new school year had just started but I, newly minted Zionist enemy, wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to my friends. I pressed the dress to my face, inhaling its institutional reek. I didn’t despise the smell as Mom did. From one pocket I fished out a fragment of Juicy Fruit in silvery foil. From another, my crumpled scarlet Young Pioneer tie.
Propelled by a sudden nostalgic patriotism I turned toward the door, ready to announce to Mom that I wanted to take the tie—but then stopped. Because I knew what she’d say.
Nyet, she’d say plainly.
Mom also said nyet to a farewell open house. And she wouldn’t allow relatives at the airport—only Sergei. The plan was to bid goodbye to close family at my grandparents’ house two nights before leaving and spend our last evening with Dad.
At our farewell dinner in Davydkovo, the Frumkin clan was in fine form. Babushka Liza had cooked her usual gloppy food for two days; Uncle Sashka got drunk, Aunt Yulia was late, and Dedushka Naum, well, he bellowed and he raged—on and on.
“My own daughter—a traitor of Rodina!”
Then, shifting from accusation, he wagged an ominous finger: “Nostalghia—it’s the MOST HORRIFYING emotion known to mankind!”
Naum had apparently confessed Mom’s treason to his benefactor, the venerated Baltic commander Admiral Tributs. The World War II great man was reassuring: “When she’s over there, starving and cold, begging us for forgiveness, we will help her to return!”
Dedushka relayed this with glee. “You’ll come crawling back,” he shouted, “on your knees, across our Soviet border! You’ll kiss our beloved black Soviet earth!”
Cousin Masha and I kicked each other under the table: everyone knew that heavily armed men and snarling German shepherds patrolled the Soviet border. No, there was no crossing back.
Marring our intimate family tableau was a houseguest, Inna, a distant relative from Chernovtsy. Sixteen and pimply, Inna had two enormous black braids and a lofty desire to work for the KGB when she graduated from high school. As Dedushka calmed down and tears coursed along Babushka Liza’s doughy cheeks, the KGB wannabe, who despite her ambitions was on the slow side, suddenly gasped in comprehension. She leapt to her feet and proclaimed that she could not share the table with a traitor! Then she barged out the door, braids swinging. On our way down we saw her on the landing, being groped by a non-sober neighbor.
But the true heartache was Baballa.
Mom concealed our departure from her until the very last month, and when Babushka Alla finally heard, she went pale as a ghost.
“All my life I’ve lost those I love,” she told Mom very quietly, lips trembling. “My husband in the war, my grandma in the gulags. When Anyuta was born I got my joy back. She’s the only thing I cherish in life. How can you take her away?”
“To save her life,” Mom replied gravely.
To avoid more heartbreak, Mother pleaded with Baballa not to see us off on our departure morning. Baballa was there all the same. She sat on a bench outside our apartment house, wearing her usual blue pencil skirt, striped blouse, and a hastily applied smear of red lipstick. She was fifty-seven, bleached blonde, six feet tall, and gorgeous. Hugging her, I caught her familiar whiff of Red Poppy face powder and Belomor cigarettes. Shyly she pressed a bottle of vodka and a tin of black caviar into Mom’s hands.
As our taxi drove off I saw her sink onto the bench. That was my last image of her.
At customs we were prodded and questioned, our puny luggage turned inside out. They confiscated Mom’s letters from Lucien, along with a green spray can of Jazmin, a classy imported deodorant.
“That’s your luggage?” said the feral blond passport official, eyeing our two dwarf suitcases. “Veyz mir,” he taunted in a mock Yiddish accent.
I walked backwards for a few steps, waving to Dad, who stood on the other side of the chrome barrier. He was making a “write me” sign with his hands. On the stairs leading up to the departure gate I caught another glimpse of him through the glass. He seemed small and hunched, suddenly, desperately gesticulating to Mom. I tugged at her sleeve but she just kept marching up—a five-foot, hundred-pound elf looking like a miniature sergeant in her hand-sewn khaki skirt suit. I thought of Orpheus, how he glanced back and screwed everything up, and I stopped looking at Dad.
On the plane I was on my ninth plastic tumbler of free Pepsi when they made the announcement. “We have just left Soviet territory.” I wanted to sit there with Mom and ponder the moment, but my bladder was bursting.
Six months later. The elfin woman trudges along the edge of a highway, ahead of her girl, who’s just turned eleven and is now the taller of the pair. Fordi, Pon-ti-aki, Chev-ro-leti. Woman and girl have been learning the names of the different cars that go roaring past, only catastrophic inches away. Apparently there are no sidewalks in Northeast Philadelphia. At least not on the road that leads from the Pathmark as vast as Red Square to their drab one-bedroom on Bustleton Avenue, its ceiling even lower than a khrushcheba’s, its wall-to-wall carpet the murky, speckled gray of crushed hope.
It’s an obscure, foggy night—humid although it’s almost December. The woman has on a flimsy hand-me-down parka, courtesy of her school friend Irina, who helped sponsor her American visa. The girl wears a little-old-lady-style belted coat with sleeves way too short and a bedraggled synthetic fur trim. Both woman and girl are panting, hugging the guardrail as they laboriously trudge. Their arms clutch a paper grocery bag each. Occasionally they put the heavy bags down, slump on the guardrail, and shake their tired arms. Lights glare poisonously through the fog. It starts drizzling. Then raining. The girl struggles with her coat to shield her grocery bag, but it breaks anyway. Squishy loaves of white bread and trays of thirty-nine-cent chicken parts tumble onto the road’s edge. Cars slow down, honk—offering rides? The girl—me—is silently crying. For so many reasons, really. But my mother—the woman—stays cheerful, unperturbed, scrambling to snatch a box of blueberry Pop-Tarts from the oncoming traffic and stuff it into her bag, which is still holding up, miraculously. Clasping the grocery bag with one arm for a moment, she shoots an awkward wave back at the honking cars, shaking her head “no” to a ride. They can’t see her smile in the dark.
“Come, isn’t this an adventure, Anyutik?” she exclaims, trying to cheer me up. “Aren’t Americans nice?”
At this particular sodden moment, of the multitude of things I so sorely miss about Moscow, I miss our avoska bag more than anything else.
And the precious trusted mayonnaise jar—the one we bore to Vienna, then Rome, then Philadelphia? I’ve been missing it, too. Because that Mature Socialist totem has vanished from our lives forever, after Mom, almost straight off the plane, rushed me to see a world-renowned scleroderma expert.
The fancy American hospital where he worked turned out to be barren of diversions and character: no instructive syphilis posters, no patients carrying matchboxes with stool samples and Provansal vessels with urine—along with chocolates and Polish pantyhose—to the bribe-expecting receptionist. No nurses screaming “Trakhatsa nado menshe!” (You should screw less!) at gonorrhea sufferers.