Stalina (10 page)

“I love apples,” Mr. Suri said, biting into his again.

“I feel better now,” I said.

“What are you going to do about your mother? In India we cremate and send the ashes on a paper boat into the river.”

“I think the rooming house can organize a cremation. They are very practical about such things in Russia.”

“Will you go?”

“It’s very expensive. Olga can…”

“What about Olga?”

“She can help with the arrangements. She has her own beauty salon not far from the rooming house.”

“Do you think people need to have their hair done for cremations?” he asked and cocked his head. In that moment I saw him as a very young boy. Innocent and curious.

“No, that wouldn’t be very practical. I need to go home, Mr. Suri.”

“Home? So you will go? You stopped crying. I’ll see if I can get someone to cover your shifts.”

“I mean home to Star Lane, not Leningra…I mean Petersburg.”

Even though he was being very patient with me, I could tell he was agitated that the couple in the Gazebo Room had not yet vacated. He was staring at the empty room-key hook.

“I can knock on room one when I go to put Svetlana back in the linen room.”

“Thank you, I was starting to think I would have to call them again.”

He opened the office door, threw his apple core under the pine trees, and said, “That crow eats apples.”

I stood up with the sleeping Svetlana in my arms. She barely stirred. When I stepped outside, her eyes opened wide and she stretched her paws.

Caw! Caw!

The crow had flown down to grab the apple core.

“Svetlana, there’s your adoptive mother.” The cat squirmed in my arms, wanting to get down. “Not now, I’ll let you be with her tomorrow.”

The couple from room one was coming out of the room as I approached the door. They looked slightly shell-shocked, but they managed to smile as we passed each other.

“I hope you liked the room,” I said.

“Very unusual,” the young man said.

“Very stimulating,” the young girl said with a laugh.

I turned around to watch them and saw her grab the back pocket of his dungarees and hold on to it as they walked to the office. A successful experience in the “Gazebo in a Rainstorm” gives me great satisfaction.

*  *  *

It was two o’clock in the morning Leningrad time. The same nurse was probably still doing the night shift at the rooming house. She could tell me what happened when my mother died. I wondered if she traded those bras for something worthwhile. I’d only sold one I brought here, but it was very well received. It was the largest one, 85DD, which translates in American sizes to 45DD. A maid who worked for Amalia’s cleaning agency bought it. She found it particularly sexy.

She told me, “I usually have to wear bras that look like forklifts. Forget about anything sexy or pretty.”

I sold the bra for twenty-five dollars. “What a steal,” she said. “Can you get any more?”

I have to say, in Russia we have a great history of lingerie, going back to the czar’s French mistresses. There were scandals about frilly undergarments, duels, and champagne while the serfs dug carriages out of muddy ditches.

“Here you go, my kitten Svetlana, back to your linens. Mara, are you here?”

“Geez, can’t a girl get a decent nap?” she said, raising her head from between the piles of towels.

“You are going to have to clean the Gazebo Room soon. The couple just left. Your uncle has not called you yet?”

“No, but I expect he’ll be sending me a smoke signal soon.”

The crackling of the intercom started, and Mr. Suri’s voice came over sounding like a soldier reporting from a wartime trench.

“MAR
crrrr
A!
crrrr
…rooms one…
crr
and four are…
crrr
empty!”

“Mr. Suri, it’s Stalina. Mara’s on her way. Will you call me a cab?”

“
Crrrr
…yes, Stalina,
crr
…of course…
crrr
.”

“Thank you. Someday we’ll have a new intercom.”

“
Crrrrrrrrrr…
”

“Mara…” I started to tell her.

“I’m on my way, comrade.”

“My mother died.”

“Nothing like dropping a bomb in the linen room, Stalina. I’m so sorry.”

“I just found out. I thought you should know.”

“I am sorry.”

“She was old. I’m going home now.”

“To Russia?”

“Star Lane is home now.”

Mara quickly gathered her cleaning supplies and was out the door. Svetlana made a sound like a balloon losing air as she circled into a pile of warm sheets.

The motel signs flapped in the wind as we drove past. The clouds looked like exhausted soldiers marching across a field going dark. The worn tires of the Mike’s Taxi Service sedan skidded into the wet curves. To keep from sliding across the plastic seat cover, I held onto a strap dangling behind the driver’s seat. With the window open, the rain on my face diluted the salt of my tears. The air tasted like metal. Everything appears to move in slow motion after someone has died—the clouds, the car, and even my tears.

My mother was there, in the corners of the back seat, lingering in the taxi with me. We were often silent together. Standing on a platform waiting for a train, queuing on food lines, or sitting in our apartment watching a shaft of light move across the room. Little or no conversation, just lingering. She was in the shadows somewhere for sure. Even here in Connecticut, USA, I could smell her soft skin and brittle, angel-white hair. Now that she had abandoned her fragile body, ravaged brain, and creaking cot, she was free to roam. Perhaps she had become a rattling cable car on Nevsky Prospekt, or a thornbush in the garden of Anna Akhmatova’s house. Maybe she traveled across the sea and entered the cuckoo clock on Amalia’s kitchen wall so she could disrupt the silence every half hour. My brain in sorrow and slow motion was a very accepting brain, even for reincarnation. When there is time and no time left at the same moment, we linger, shifting our weight from one foot to the other, our soul seeking a way out. There is a superstition in Russia that when there is a lull in the conversation, another policeman has been born. No wonder there is often discomfort in silence.

When my father died, only the people in Kolyma, the labor camp where he was sent, knew. We received a parcel with his ashes and clothes a year later. It must have taken months in the Siberian cold for his body to decompose. On the shirttail of his prison-issue shirt, almost in tatters, I found something scrawled in charcoal. It was this poem:

Everything here will die.

Never know when, why, or how.

Will the remains remain?

Ashes will float on the air for all to breathe.

The funerals here are defied by our minds.

Never let go. Double-fisted breath.

I transcribed the poem to the back of the photograph I had taken of him when I was young. I stared for days at that photograph, puzzled because I had remembered it differently. I thought he only had one hand on the shovel, but clearly both hands gripped the handle. Every morning I would pull the photograph out from under my pillow where I kept it at night. One day I imagined that his smile had shifted from one side of his mouth to the other. I screamed with surprise, thinking he was still alive in the picture. My mother woke me from the dream and wiped the dust and smudges from my fingerprints on the glass.

45 Star Lane, the taxi will drive…

Just like the last line in the song I made up and sang when I first arrived here two years ago.
Moscow, Kennedy, Port Authori-tay!
That adventure felt like ancient history. But there I was, again being driven to 45 Star Lane. I really could use a song now, I thought. I’d add something to this old one, like letting out a skirt when your waist has gotten too big. Just another line or two would do. 45 Star Lane is quaint on the outside and shoddy on the inside. When I first came here, it looked like a fairyland of perfect little houses with birds singing on wires and the wind rustling from the tops of the trees down to the blades of grass on the square lawns. Behind all this, the houses had walls so thin that from any room in the house you could hear someone turning the pages of a magazine while they sat in the bathroom. The windows didn’t keep out the wind and the rain, so the sills had gone rotten from never drying out. Lately I’d noticed a mold growing where the windows met the walls. I’d been spraying disinfectant, the same we used at the Liberty Motel, to try to kill the spores, but it had done nothing. Chain-link fences divided the houses into scraggly lawns that were decorated with painted wooden cutouts of plentiful women’s behinds rising into the air. The make-believe gardeners were bent over tending to their pansies and impatiens. Bulging roots of the sycamore trees had come through the sidewalks like arms and legs of waking giants. The neighbors kept to themselves.

45 Star Lane, the taxi will drive,

A quaint white house with rotting windowsills.

Amalia might not appreciate this new line. I could add something more pleasant.

I live with Amalia, and we both pay the bills.

The taxi arrived at my home.

“Thank you, sir, you are an excellent driver.”

“Mike’s Taxis, you can always count on us, miss.”

When he turned around, I could see that his handlebar mustache had crumbs stuck in the sides and he was wearing a cap with a picture of a fish.

“Do you like fish?” I asked.

“Bass season starts soon. How’d you know?”

I pointed to his hat.

“My girls sent me a year of
Bassmaster
magazine for my birthday.”

“They must appreciate their father very much.”

“Nah, they just like to get me out of the house.”

The radio started to squawk. He picked up the mouthpiece. “Bassman, over.”

A woman’s voice came on. “Hey, good lookin’, get that junk heap of yours over to Charleston’s Bar. Barry needs a ride home; his wife has to leave for work. Over.”

“That’s Randi; she’s a ball buster,” he said, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

Then into the radio again he said, “Keep your titties straight, mama, I’m on my way. Over.”

“Fuck off, lover, over,” she replied.

“I’m just finishing up with Star Lane, sweet meat, over.”

Then he turned back to me. “She and I have known each other since high school.”

“I live here with Amalia; we’ve know each other since we were children.”

“Are you going to be all right?” My swollen eyes must have concerned him.

“Yes, thank you, now that I am here. It’s my mother; I just found out she died. She was still in Russia.”

“I’m sorry. It’s like that, people and things go away, they end, leave us to ourselves.”

“Yes, they do. Thank you, Mr. Bassman.”

I was still holding on to the strap behind the driver. It was a comfort to hang on to something. I drifted back to St. Petersburg for a moment as I started getting myself out of the cab.

*  *  *

“It’s just not practical. We are not going anywhere,” Trofim had said without looking in my eyes.

It was a summer night. I was just nineteen and in love.

We met to watch the bridges go up over the Neva.

“Opening the bridges
is
a practical thing,” I said. “We may not be able to travel to the other side of the river, but it saves the government money. They don’t have to pay anyone to operate the bridges through the night.”

He wanted to end our relationship, not debate bridge operations.

“Stalina, this is not about the bridges,” he said, looking down at the water.

The river was black and oily. Our faces reflected in the lapping waves looked like photographs developing in a darkroom. I watched the light in the sky disappear. It was gone for just minutes, and when it began to get light again, Trofim was already walking across the bridge before it was even fully down. He never turned around. I stood motionless until everyone rushing to get home to change for work pushed me along the canal. He was gone. It felt like someone had died.

*  *  *

Many years later, in Connecticut, USA, I felt a similar emptiness. As I stood outside the cab, the rain started coming down harder. My cheeks stung with the salt of my tears. I leaned through the window to pay the driver.

“It’s been taken care of, miss. Your boss paid for the ride. Go. Get out of the rain.” He shook the crumbs from his mustache.

“Mr. Suri is a very nice man,” I told the driver.

I heard the dispatcher’s voice over his radio again. “Move it along, Barry the Barfly just fell off his barstool.”

“On my way, general, ma’am,” he said to the radio. And then to me he said, “Take it easy, miss. Get yourself inside.” He drove away.

Amalia opened the door and came out with an umbrella over her head. “Stalina,” she said, “come in out of the rain. You’re home.”

It was good to be home.