Little Failure (56 page)

“Little son, let’s go for a moment just down this block. It’s a moment of great sadness.”

My father seems quite intent on leading me past a pretty young woman smelling a daisy. We are approaching the portico of the cream-colored two-hundred-year-old Mariinskaya Municipal Hospital, one of the city’s largest.

“I spent time here,” my father says. “In the
nervnoye otdeleniye
.”

I run the Russian through my mind. The sky is pressing down on us with a heavy gray lid. The
Nervous
Department? What exactly is he trying to say? My father was a mental patient? For the first time on this trip, I feel danger. A traveler’s danger. Like when I took the wrong taxi in Bogotá a year ago, speeding away from my hotel instead of toward it.

“How old were you?” my mother asks.

“Let’s see. My mother was …” He has to think of her age first, before he can determine his own.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right
. “So I was twenty-three,” he concludes.

The information hovers in front of me, still in the form of a question.
My father was a twenty-three-year-old mental patient?
I finger the calming Ativan pill, the lone resident of my jeans pocket. The taxi is still hurtling toward the Colombian jungles, toward the band of rebels who will hold me hostage for decades.

“So young,” my mother says.

“I was in the crazy ward,” my father says. “And they thought I would remain a
durak
[idiot] forever.”

“This street leads to Pestelya Street, where my friend lived,” my mother says, apropos of nothing.

“And so, little son,” my father interrupts her, “it’s a long story. I was in the hospital, they performed terrible experiments on me, and I almost died.”

I make an affirming noise.
Uhum
.

“They made me drink buckets of valerian root, bromine, so that I wouldn’t have any male desires.”

Oho
, I say. I cannot even begin to imagine what he’s saying.

“
Uzhas
,” my mother says. Horror.

“And there were real crazy people in there. There was one old guy he would shit himself every week and smear the shit on the wall.”

“The Tsar’s Pierogi!” my mother reads a passing sign with interest.

“And he’d scream, ‘Down with Lenin and Stalin!’ ” My mother laughs. “They’d pacify him and then in a week he’d be back at it. We had quiet crazy people, too. I was the quietest.” My mother laughs with her head thrown back. “But I could have been loud. After this they gave me a
spravka
[certificate] attesting to my stay, and they wouldn’t take me in the army.”

“But what brought this on?” my mother asks.

“I was sitting at home, reading a book, and then my mother found me on the floor, foaming at the mouth, convulsions, like an epileptic. That was the first and last time.”

Ativan in my mouth, I ask the next question: “What was the diagnosis?”

“Soldering of the vessels in the brain.” As soon as he says it, I think what my psychoanalyst back in Manhattan will soon affirm. The Soviet diagnosis is complete nonsense.

“When your father proposed to me,” my mother says, “he said, ‘I have a certificate. I have a mental illness.’ And I thought: What a typical Jewish trick. He’s completely healthy. He just doesn’t want to serve in the army. But it turned out it was the truth.

“We’re so stupid when we’re young. Someone tells you they’re
mentally ill, why would you marry him? But I thought, He’s such a smart, serious person. It can’t be. I would notice if he were psychotic. But sometimes, especially as he’s aged, you can see that he really
is
mentally ill.” My mother laughs. The simple trill of her laugh has not declined over the years; if anything it’s been buffeted by her endless sorrows and disappointments.

By his early twenties my father has failed his exams and has been kicked out of Leningrad’s Polytechnic Institute. “My mother used to nag me,” he says. “ ‘What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?’ ”

“Just like I used to do to you,” my mother says to me, laughing some more. She switches to English: “Failure! Failure! Failure!”

My father’s eyes dart around his fabulous sunglasses, his teeth are relatively straight and white for this part of the world, his beard is white flecked with gray, as mine is already flecking at an accelerated pace. As an old friend of his had just said to me: “You are an exact copy of your father. You have nothing of your mother’s.” Which is not entirely true. My father has been adjudged more handsome than I. But if the poem I wrote in college, “My Reflection,” can be believed, we are almost brothers. Our brain scans would probably attest to that as well. The Ativan is melting under my tongue, entering the bloodstream.

Later my father will tell me about another “treatment” he received at the hospital. They puncture his spine with a needle and blast oxygen into it, trying to “unsolder” the blood vessels of his brain. He comes out a wreck, scared of taking the tram, afraid of leaving his room. The middle half of his twenties are a wasteland of depression and anxiety. It is impossible to know what led him to foam at the mouth and convulse in the first place, but my psychoanalyst believes a neurological episode, a grand mal seizure, for example, may have been the cause. Treatments for neurological disorders generally do not include placement in a clinic where psychopaths smear their feces along the wall, injection of oxygen into the spine, and the administration of bromine to fight a young man’s erections.

I part ways with my parents for the evening. I meet my good friend K in the southern suburb in which he lives. We share a spicy kebab at an Armenian joint. We tell jokes about a certain horse-faced leader in the Kremlin, and I drink as much vodka as I can. He has work tomorrow, but as we embrace and he puts me on a tram back to Uprising Square, I don’t want to leave him. Drunkenly, I watch the city assemble itself outside my tram window, the Soviet giving way to the baroque.

My father was a mental patient.

So now I forgive him?

But it was never about forgiveness. It is about understanding. The whole psychoanalytic exercise is about understanding.

What did he say when I told him years ago I was seeing a psychiatrist? “It would have been better if you had told me you were a homosexual.”

But he knows, doesn’t he?

He knows what it’s like not to have control over yourself. To see the world pass right through your hands.

Is he trying to settle up with me?

I wander into the new Galeria mall, a behemoth by Uprising Square, filled with Polo and Gap stores, and all the other purveyors of the Hebrew school clothing I never owned. It’s sad to reach out to past hurts and find nothing there. Just the splash of my sneakers against the cold Galeria marble, the echoes of my footsteps, because at this late hour on a weekday I am practically alone.

In my hotel room, with my parents just a floor above me, I put my head to my pillow and think of my wife. I think of the warmth of her. I think of the relative silence of her own immigrant family, the silence that I crave. My wife. Even though I am “the writer,” she reads more than I do. She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But
their anxiety means they still want to live. A year shy of forty, I feel my life entering its second half. I feel my life folding up. I sense the start of that great long leave-taking. I think of myself on the subway platform at Union Square. I am invisible, just a short obstacle others have to get around. Sometimes I wonder: Am I already gone? And then I think of my wife and I feel the whoosh of the number 6 train, the presence of others, the life still within me.

Why did he tell me this today?

The Admiralty building on the banks of the Neva River, headquarters of the Russian navy, has been built in the same loud Empire style as the hospital where my father spent part of his life. The Admiralty, a kind of early-nineteenth-century skyscraper, is topped by a gilded spire itself topped by a small sail warship, which appears regularly on local souvenirs and whose platonic shape delighted me as a child, a golden addendum to the warships in the Chesme Church. To the southwest of the Admiralty building lies the vast central Admiral-teiskii Rayon, a district of initial grandeur and increasing shabbiness. This is where my mother hails from.

My mother studied and later taught piano. I believe the reverence of music she shared with my opera-obsessed father allowed these two dissimilar people to fall in love. The story of my mother’s introduction to music is slightly different from the story of my first encounter with words at the behest of her mother, Grandmother Galya.

“When I was five,” my mother says as we exchange the colonnaded riverbanks and canals for the shawarma-reeking depths of her neighborhood, “my father bought me a balalaika that cost forty rubles. This was the last money we had and it was supposed to be used for food. My mother [Grandmother Galya] took the balalaika and smashed it against the wall of our apartment. I started to cry. My mother comforted me by saying, ‘I know you’re crying not because I smashed the balalaika but because you can see how upset I am. You’re very sensitive.’ ”

My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?

I think back to the Kiev-style cutlet she sold me when I had graduated from Oberlin. I see mother’s laughing face as she puts the twenty-dollar bill she’s inveigled out of me in the pocket of her pink pullover. She is happy. Haggling with her son is fun, especially since he always loses. At money matters he is also a failure. And she is laughing because she can feel that part of this must be a joke. She understands the absurdity of the moment. She will often begin an anecdote with the words “Guys, you want to laugh?” And then she will laugh herself as if to demonstrate what it’s all about.

She is laughing. But is she sad? Is part of her sad? What is it like to be her at the moment she takes my money? What does it feel like to sell your broke son a horrible piece of chicken at retail? How many years must pass before I feel sad for her?
Is this the moment? Is this why I brought them back here?

The balalaika smashes against the wall. The five-year-old girl begins to cry. And then, here in the present, the sound of a violin fills the street. We are approaching the college where the post-smashed-balalaika phase of my mother’s musical education took place. My mother poses for the camera mock-solemnly and gives it a four-finger pioneer’s salute. In the lobby a plaque commemorates alumni lost in the Second World War.
NO ONE IS FORGOTTEN
, it says. Next to the plaque are the usual bearded luminaries of the nineteenth century and next to the luminaries stands a new ATM machine. An incredibly Russian-looking boy with several layers of disheveled blond hair and a perfect potato nose is hitting the accordion pretty hard.

I can see the immediate disappointment on my mother’s face, the sadness of return, the letdown of memory. “Everything used to
shine
around here,” she says. “Now everything looks so unkempt.”

“There’s a fine stink here,” my father says, screwing up his Americanized nose at the produce of so many armpits.

“The first time I came in here, I heard a girl playing the piano,” my mother says. “I nearly dropped. I said to my father, ‘I want to study here! I
will
study here.’ And I was accepted. No one expected that of me. Stalin spent a lot of money on this stuff. He loved music.”