Little Failure (11 page)

Finis
.

I am regurgitating everything in my oxygen-starved brain, from the low art of
Nils and the Wild Geese
to the high schlock of Soviet iconography. But it’s a crueler story than anything Selma Lagerlöf, Nils’s creator, could have made up in her democratic Sweden. The lesson of
Lenin and His Magical Goose
is: Love authority but trust no one. There’s also this. I am writing the novel for my grandmother, a Communist for most of her life, and I am saying,
Grandmother: Please love me
. It’s a message, both desperate and common, that I will extend to her and to my parents and, later, to a bunch of yeshiva schoolchildren in Queens and, still later, to my several readers around the world.

It is almost time for the Shteyngarts to leave Moscow Square.

Every few weeks, the asthma gets so bad that an ambulance comes screaming into our peeling courtyard. Dr. Pochevalova, whose presence has me so scared I can conjure neither her face nor form, is remembered only by the ugly, disgustingly ugly, words floating off her stern lips. “Inflammation of the lungs” (
vospaleniye lyogkikh
) and “mustard compresses” (
gorchichniye kompressy
).

On television they will not reair
The Enchanted Boy
, but I do see a show called
Planet Andromeda
, a crude Soviet attempt at
Star Trek
genius. The one scene that stays with me: Men—cosmonauts, I suppose—are being bombarded by some kind of solar ray against a black backdrop. The cosmonauts are screaming and withering in agony.

In the courtyard of our building there is a children’s slide that is
affixed to a playground space rocket. I climb along the rusted metal ribs of the rocket, which I think of as the Good Rocket, and cautiously slide down the frozen incline, twenty kilograms of child, thirty kilograms of coat. The Good Rocket may be rusty, but it contains all the hopes and dreams of a nation that first catapulted a satellite, then a dog, then a man, into the void above us, into the void that
is
us.

The Bad Rocket is a grimy Dickensian steam pipe (oddly rocket shaped, with a wide bottom, a tapered body, and a capsule-like cone) that stretches up all five stories of our building and hums and vibrates in the night, as if it, too, has asthma. After watching
Planet Andromeda
, I convince myself that something evil is about to happen, that we are about to be bombarded with solar rays against a black backdrop, that the Bad Rocket will take off for the stars, that it will rip off a part of our building and drag me and Papa and Mama with it. I begin to sketch out ideas for a new book,
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Conquers Andromeda
. Even the far-flung galaxies must be made safe for socialism.

Unbeknownst to me, the Soviet Union is falling apart. The grain harvests have been terrible; there is hardly enough grain to feed the masses or keep them fully drunk. Meanwhile, in the United States a grassroots movement to free Soviet Jews from their polyester captivity has gained momentum. And so, the American president Jimmy Carter has reached a deal with the Russians. In exchange for tons of grain and some high technology, presumably television sets that won’t explode with such regularity, the USSR will allow many of its Jews to leave. Russia gets the grain it needs to run; America gets the Jews it needs to run: all in all, an excellent trade deal.

My parents have surrendered their jobs, sold our five-hundred-square-foot apartment, and are using the remaining rubles to ship our glossy Romanian furniture and our Red October upright piano across the Black Sea, across the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, across any body of water that will float this strange, superannuated cargo. My mother’s increasingly senile mother, Grandma Galya, has signed the documents that will permit her daughter to emigrate (another
humiliating requirement of the system: parental consent). The right visas have been placed in my parents’ passports, the rare
exit
visas that allow Soviet citizens to do the unthinkable—to get on an airplane and exit the best country in the world, the country of workers and strivers. We are about to take off for the stars, and Grandma Galya and her cheese will be left behind, so all that will remain is the memory of a thick old woman in a floral skirt and the sound of the big pencil against graph paper, her smile as she proofread my childish ravings. And there will be no more walks to Chesme Church to launch toy helicopters into the spires as my father, that predigital Wikipedia of a man, gestures at the architecture and lectures me sweetly in my mother tongue: “The first well-known church designed as a departure from the Byzantine style is the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod, built between 1045 and 1050
A.D
.”

And another dear someone will be left behind.

Lenin, my goose, my fierce bloody friend, my dreamer. What do you dream of now, on your pedestal at Moscow Square, in your mausoleum in actual Moscow?

Do you ever, would you ever, dream of me?

The author’s mother at age eleven, with the worried adult gaze he will grow to know well. Note the pretty bow in her hair. The year is 1956, and the place is the Soviet Union
.

“I
T SEEMS LIKE
you don’t really know me.

“You see me through your father’s eyes.

“And sometimes I think I do not know you.”

It is my mother’s birthday, and we are in the rotating restaurant atop the Marriott Marquis. My father and Aunt Tanya, my mother’s younger sister, have sat down at our table awaiting their truffle soup and steak medium to medium well, but my mother wants ten minutes alone with me. We are sitting by the ladies’ toilet in the restaurant’s
nonrevolving core, watching women pass by in their piquant suburban outfits, so much flesh on a freezing December night.

My mother’s line of thought confuses me. I know she is anxious about the memoir I am writing. They both are. “Tell us, how many more months do we have to live?” my father will ask about the impending publication date. But how can she say we do not know each other? We have spent eighteen years living in such close proximity that any non-Jewish, non-Italian, non-Asian American exposed to even an hour of such closeness would raise up her blond locks to the sky and cry, “Boundaries!”

Do I really not know my mother? She was my friend when I was a little boy. I was rarely allowed any others, because she deemed them disease carriers who could aggravate my bronchial illnesses. Cousin Victoria, the ballerina—I remember staring at her through glass back in Leningrad, the two of us smudging the square pane of a French door with our palms, coating it with our breath. How we wanted to reach out and hold hands. She was also an only child.

And so, mother and son alone, trudging through lines to get water for their underground vacation hut in Crimea, to marvel at the Swallow’s Nest Castle near Yalta, walking hand in hand through innumerable trains, train stations, town squares, mausoleums—and always talking to each other, because my Russian was advanced and curious, and she could use an advanced and curious companion. In those days, I eased her anxiety instead of provoking it.

And as for seeing her through my father’s eyes? For so long, I have adapted his world-weariness, his sarcasm, his
shutki
(jokes). I have tried to be him, because I was a boy and he was meant to illustrate the next step in my evolution. “Whom do you love more, your mother or your father?” was the unfair question foisted upon me by my parents in Leningrad. Unfair, because I needed my mother, needed her company and her dark hair to braid during the moments when I was too tired of reading a book. But I
felt
the explosive nature of my father’s love for me, the centering role I was to play in his difficult life. You
can either run toward such love or run away from it. Only recently have I chosen to do neither, to stand still and watch it take its course.

But as I have grown older I have chosen my mother’s life. The endless calculations, the worries, the presentiments, and, most of all, the endless work. The sunrise-to-sundown work, even in retirement, that keeps you from fully settling up with the past. The chicken cutlets she sold me for $1.40 a piece after I had graduated from college have given birth to a thousand such cutlets, a hundred thousand, a million, each clearly marked with a price tag. The fanatic attention to detail I’m sure my father never had, not as an opera singer, not as an engineer, I now call my own. As well as the attendant worry, the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of authority. As I stroll around the grounds of an upstate historic site, the mansion of FDR’s cousin-mistress, I am already preparing that all-important question for the elderly woman behind the counter: “I’ve bought tickets to the guided tour, but could I use the bathroom now, before the tour starts?”

My mother, her ambition stifled, channeled away by history and language, has given birth to my own. The only difference is: I have no God, no family myth, to cling to, no mythmaking abilities beyond the lies I tell on the page.

“Ours was such a nice family compared to your father’s,” my mother says. “We always used diminutives with each other, Ninochka, Tanechka. We had season’s tickets to the symphony.” When announced with such regularity, the Song of the Enlightened Loving Family, triumphing over adversity and despair, begins to sound like my father’s Song of Israel, which is always holy, always incapable of wrong. Am I mad to think that love is not so easy? Or am I missing the right gene for easy love?

“And sometimes I think I do not know you,” my mother says.

I have written close to twelve hundred pages of fiction, all of it translated into Russian, and hundreds of pages of nonfiction, much of it about the experience of being a Russian child in America, some of it trapped between the pages of this very book. Even if the fictional parts were not entirely autobiographical, shouldn’t they have served as
at least a partial explanation for who I am? Or were the more important parts obfuscated by the
shutki
? Or perhaps, scarier still, the cognitive gap between mother and son is too great; the distance from here to there, from Moscow Square to my apartment near Union Square to this revolving restaurant in Times Square, cannot be closed with words alone.