Little Failure (57 page)

We trudge out of the music school and toward the distant Pryazhka River. “Why are all the windows boarded up?” my mother asks, as we approach the house where she grew up.
SALE
, a sign says in English.
APARTMENTS
, 228
METERS
. “Look, they’ve set everything on fire!” Indeed, one of the windows has been blown out, the surrounding frame charred black.

My mother looks around the building’s ruined courtyard uncertainly. “Petya Zabaklitski from our class, he lived in that entryway over there, every day he would run ahead and wait for me. And whenever I walked home he would shout, ‘Yasnitskaya [my mother’s maiden name]
the Jewess
is coming. Yasnitskaya
the Jewess
is coming!’ This was the first sorrow of my life.”

My father grew up in the village of Olgino, northwest of the city center in the so-called resort area of Petersburg, which hugs the northern banks of the Gulf of Finland. Several redbrick mafioso-style estates, their boundary walls sprinkled with security cameras, have appeared along its rutted streets, but Olgino still feels like a half-wrecked semi-rural neighborhood moored in some failing periphery. We could be in Michigan or Sicily or North Africa or Pakistan. Only the weather betrays our latitude.

Today is cold and rainy, but the village is swaddled in the unkempt greenery which my father is clearly delighted to see. We are approaching a ramshackle green house built in some indeterminate Soviet style of rural housing, New England barn meets Russian
izba
meets instant decay.

“Here would pass a herd of cows,” he says. “In the morning I would
have to push out our cow, Rosa, so that she would go into the forest with the other cows. There was a shepherd with a cattle prod. Oy, my heart is starting to jump!”

There is laughter coming out from under his baseball cap. The snow-white goatee is mirthful. He speaks without pause. “Our house was one of the biggest houses, fifteen-twenty families lived in it. Here there were little garden plots.” We walk by a vast rotting woodpile. “Here was our veranda.” We walk by boarded-up windows. “Here we planted flowers.” A collapsing brick shack sheltering an old Suzuki four-by-four. “Here Aunt Sonya had a little barn, sheep, pigs, cows. We had a good warm barn, you could keep a cow or a piglet there in winter. Here was the outhouse. Always tons of shit there. Frozen shit in the winter. Here lived a girl named Gelya, when boys my age or older would see her we’d always shout ‘Gelya,
opa
! Gelya,
opa
!’ And she would laugh.” He makes a humping motion at the invisible Gelya.

“Be careful, there are stray dogs here,” my mother says.

We pass by an old Soviet radio jamming tower. “After I was released from the hospital,” my father says, “I was still half-crazy. My heart kept trembling. My mother and I rented a room here in the summer. I lived here from May to November, and I was mostly alone. Every day I’d go to the gulf,” the nearby Gulf of Finland, “swimming morning and night, even when there was ice. This saved me. This made me a human being again, as opposed to an invalid.”

My father traces his weak nerves back to his life with Ilya, or Ilyusha in the diminutive, his cruel, erratic, alcoholic stepfather, whom my father eventually overpowered. “We lived in a room a hundred sixty square feet,” my father says. “Ilya was capable of anything.”

“And you fought with him?” I ask.

Proudly: “I beat him! Until he bled!
Until he bled!
”

My mother laughs. “A good little son you were.”

“My mother would come home and she would find out. We’d be silent, but there would be traces of blood on the curtains and elsewhere. My mother, of course, loved me more than him.”

We are passing a line of birches, so clean and bright in the miserable
weather. My father introduces a new subject. “Why am I so strong [
krepkii
], even to this day? Because from seven to five I worked hard. And I also played sports. Skis, skates, running, swimming. If you do farm work, you don’t even need to exercise.

“I learned to love the peasant’s work. Jews weren’t supposed to do that. And in tsarist Russia Jews weren’t even given land, because they were supposed to be lazy and good for nothing.

“I still have very good memories of Olgino. Because I am basically a country person. I like reading and music and all that. But I don’t like big cities. Not Manhattan, not Leningrad. To go to the opera, the museum,
fine
. But I like to be surrounded by trees, forest, grass, fresh air, fishing, and sunshine.”

We walk toward the gulf which restored his sanity.

We find ourselves back on Nevsky Prospekt, approaching the sienna-colored tower of the old city
duma
, or assembly. This is where first dates in Petersburg often begin, and my parents were no different. They met on the steps beneath the Italianate tower, where today, dozens of teenaged and twenty-something boys and girls are huffing away at cigarettes, tapping away on their phones. “When we first met I couldn’t understand what she was,” my father says. “It was as if some kind of orange had walked up to me.”

“I painted my cheeks with orange powder,” my mother explains. “My friend had a boyfriend who knew how to get anything. And so for New Year’s he got everyone Polish powder, which was orange. But we were all very proud of it. All of Leningrad was orange. Anything Polish was a big deal. Such pretty packaging.”

“So,” my father continues, “I was standing there and I saw this orange person. And I thought this is not one of ours! It must be a foreigner. She was more yellow than a Chinese.”

“I’m telling you it was the Polish powder!”

“I was wearing a hat that looked like—”

“A pierogi.”

“That looked like a pierogi. It was called a
khrushchyovka
. Gray and made of sheep. And I was also wearing a handsome French coat.”

“
Very
handsome,” my mother says, and I breathe in that sentence deeply. My parents still love each other.

On our way back to the hotel, they mention that there is only eighteen thousand dollars left on the mortgage of their Little Neck home and that they will pay this sum off within months. “Now we will be free!” my father says.

Now they will be free.

We are crossing Moscow Square.

They’ve put in gaudy fountains next to the pine trees where my father and I would play hide-and-seek. Beneath my Lenin there’s a temporary summer stage from which issues horrible thumping Russian pop, something about sun rays and “Get closer / closer to my heart.” There are Nike swooshes where the old
gastronom
used to be. Children who have no knowledge of the Great Leader scamper on and off Lenin’s podium, singing “la la la la la.” A lone boy in camouflage pants is texting with his mouth open. A man is holding a woman’s ass by the fountains, his bare shorts-clad legs wrapped around her. This is my sacred space, Moscow Square, June 2011.

We are approaching the building where we lived; beyond it, the Chesme Church. I am breathing hard. I have to pee. My father is telling me how Franklin D. Roosevelt ruined America.

We walk into the peeling entry way of our apartment house. The building is painted in the unappetizing colors of rose and dun, festooned with great loops of graffiti. Runty-looking kids are sitting by some ad hoc storage containers. The grass is overgrown with weeds and daisies.

“Where was the rocket?” I ask, curious about the rusty spaceship where I used to play Cosmonaut.

“The rocket was over there,” my father says, pointing at a standard-issue multicolored playground with swings and slides. A touch of
sunlight, but no more, falls upon the courtyard where I used to spend my healthy days. The scraggly trees take what they can get.

“I always had nightmares about a big black steam pipe,” I say.

“That pipe, little son, was somewhere near here.”

“What were you afraid of?” my mother asks. “What did you imagine? You were afraid of tree roots when you were three.”

“Freud could have said a lot about all this,” I say, forgetting my audience. “He might have said it was about sexuality. The child growing up, afraid of becoming …” My mother grimaces. I stop talking.

Our former lives hang above us. Beige brick, casement windows, the occasional wooden or iron balcony, exposed gray piping, black electrical wires.

“It was big and dark,” my father says of the pipe.

“Like a rocket,” I say. “I always thought there was going to be an explosion. And we’d all be flung into the cosmos.”

“No kidding,” my mother says. “How could you even have imagined that?”

We return to the street, the facades of our megablock forming a pinkish wave flanked by a column of oaks.

“And over there, to the left, there was a church,” my father says.

The sidewalks have piled against each other like so many adolescent teeth. An unreformed ancient tram passes with a nineteenth-century European clatter. My mother is limping on the way to the church. My father jokes that she’s drunk too much beer at Little Jap (Yaponchik), the Moscow Square sushi joint with the casually racist name where we just ate lunch.

“I didn’t drink too much,” my mother protests, “I didn’t eat too much. I have a corn on my foot.”

“Can’t bring the old lady with us,” my father says. “We should have left her home.” I laugh, a braying sound. This is how they talk. This is how I never learned to talk. Not in Russian. Not in English. The supposedly
funny banter with a twist of the knife. That’s what I have my novels for.

My father squeezes her with love. “
Starukha
[old lady],” he says, “let’s take her by the arms and legs and throw her in the garbage dump.”

“I’m not drunk. I drank half what you drank.”

“You drank all the beer.”

All of this is said in good humor and could go on for the rest of the afternoon. But it stops.

We are standing in front of
it
. The sky is the same dour gray as every other day, while
it
is the same pastry pink they serve at my mother’s favorite Café North on Nevsky. “What a pretty church,” I say. “This used to be the museum of … the naval fleet, something like that?”