Stalina (3 page)

Amalia had written to me, “Bring something to remember home. Bring something to sell, and wear as much clothing as possible on the plane. You want to have space in your bag for anything to be used for commerce, to sell or barter. It is part of survival in America. Fly to Moscow from Petersburg. The flight from Moscow to US will cost less, even with the connection.”

At the airport outside Petersburg the next day, the customs officer found my packing job quite amusing, commenting, “Looks like you need an engineer’s degree to pack a bag like this.”

“My degree is in chemistry. It is all about how things in the universe fit together, like a well-packed valise.”

“Your universe is a curious place,” he said as he ran his fingers along the top of the bras I had packed.

He touched everything in my bag. Under each of his fingernails was a line of black dirt collected from digging into other people’s possessions. I had systematically packed my double-strapped leather valise with the twenty-four brassieres, sizes 75B to 85DD. Sized in our metric system, I hoped these undergarments would make American ladies feel grand; 34B to 44DD is otherwise unimpressive. I used several of the larger sized bras to protect my collection of porcelain cats. The oldest one, a Siamese, was a present from Olga for my ninth birthday. Underneath the cats I had packed my father’s copy of
Julius Caesar
, his favorite play, and a leather-bound copy of Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass
, which he read to me every year on my birthday when I was young. A photo album with pictures of my family and friends lay at the bottom of the bag, along with framed photos of my grandparents cushioned by my grandmother’s fur hat and gloves. I’d heard the American winters were bad—not as cold as Leningrad, but very wet. Poetry books by Anna Akhmatova had stockings and other undergarments wrapped around them. Into five pairs of socks I packed ten Russian
matryoshka
dolls, which I understood to be popular in America. I find them disturbing, as they show how easily a woman can be reduced to practically nothing. On top I laid my lab coat, which I’d received as a gift from Trofim, my chemistry professor from university. My lover.

The customs man read my name on the passport. “Stalina, that’s a lovely name.”

He obviously did not go to school with me. My fellow students would belittle me about my name. They would say, “Take another name, Stalina. How about Lotte or Anna or Tatiana? Millions died under Stalin. You are not his namesake anymore. Take this monster away from your life.”

“I will never change it,” I told them. “My name is our past.”

Perhaps this customs officer was a supporter of Stalin. There are those who wish for a return to Stalinism, and to honor the general for stopping the Nazis. In Petersburg today a small group stands in front of the Grostiny Dvor department store on Nevsky Prospekt with sandwich boards and petitions disseminating information for their cause. Occasionally an argument erupts between them and passersby, but in general they are just thought to be crazy and are whispered about in the cafés.

I passed him my papers. There are no lies on my passport. A capital letter
J
stamped in the lower left corner indicates I am a Jew. When I left, the government made it easy for Jews, especially an oldie like me, to leave. The customs inspector handed back my passport and made a slow, deliberate stroke with his forefinger along the top of my hand. I took my bag and smiled out of relief at passing the inspection. As I walked through the gate, I felt his stare on my heavily padded behind swinging from side to side like a cushion-covered pendulum.

I did not sleep and mostly cried during the twelve-hour flight to America. The clouds surrounded us like steam at my local banya. Instead of glistening bodies revealed in the breaks of heavy mist, I saw a landscape of clouds and ice-capped mountains as we crossed over Finland and then Greenland, where the sun’s light was tippling off the waves of the Atlantic. When we lost the sun and the moon rose, the dark waters looked like scores of crystal chandeliers lighting our way. The sun had come up when we left Petersburg, and I saw it rise again as we passed over an island the stewardess called Prince Edward. While in the air, I sorted through memories and divided them like the test tubes I once cleaned in the lab. Long, short, cracked, hard to see through, lined with residue, all dropped into the washbasin of my brain, bobbing to the surface when a path was made clear, or simply pulled up from below with a snap of my rubber-gloved hand.

*  *  *

Seeing a glimpse of the ocean’s waves through the clouds made me think of how I used to swim in the Gulf of Finland with my mother just a few years before I left Russia. The doctors said it was the best therapy for her dementia.

“The cold water will awaken the senses and stimulate the organs. Her blood will flow more readily. It’s all about blood flow,” they would say.

My mother had been a member of a water ballet collective in her youth and consequently swam beautifully. I loved to watch her swim and tried to imitate her curved arms and the precise entry of her fingertips into the water. On one of our regular Sunday swims, a family secret was revealed.

That day Mother came up for air after a long time underwater and announced, “Swimming makes me think of Maxim.”

Maxim was my uncle.

She continued, “Maxim kissed me underwater.”

I thought she was confused. “Don’t you mean Father kissed you?”

“No! Kisses were from Maxim. We kissed so long we had no air; he emptied the last drop of air into my lungs.”

“You almost drowned?”

“We bobbed to the surface, and I breathed the air back into his lungs.”

“What about Father?”

My mother replied, “Your father let me have the pleasure I did not have with him.”

“With his brother?”

“He’s not your uncle.” She was annoyed as if I should have known.

As we both treaded water, a seagull landed near us. The bird screeched at a piece of sodden bread floating by and grabbed it in his beak. Another bird swooped down and stole it out of his mouth. The first gull did not pursue his foe. Instead, he floated past us and let out a feeble screech to no one in particular.

“How spineless,” I thought. That gull reminded me of my father, who would stay home writing and drinking when my mother and Maxim would go out together. After a couple of years, he was only drinking and never wrote anything new. He would obsessively read and reread his published poems and essays, pacing up and down our room holding the book or journal in front of him and taking a pen from behind his ear to make the changes. He wrote about vodka as a metaphor for oppressive government. Many of his poems were in English. His supporters would learn them and deliver his words through the underground to publishers outside Russia. I memorized all his poems. This was a typical practice to save the writings of our country’s poets. On paper their work could easily be lost, destroyed, or sent to the authorities. Like this one:

Stalin demands we drink his vodka.

Why should he be everyone’s doctor?

Perish the thought if you drank sangria,

Cover your ears to block his logorrhea.

Our future will rise like a glass filled with

Schnapps, port, or rye.

Your choice, your high,

While the others fall blind, no future, no time.

He inspired other writers to write what was on their minds, while he became more and more crippled by the loss of freedom for words and humor. It was to him the height of cruelty. At the end of the night, the liquor would be gone and the pages were unintelligible.

*  *  *

After going through some unexpected turbulence, the plane landed safely in New York City on September 30, 1991. That was when my strange new life began.

Kennedy Airport is all about moving things. Airplanes, luggage, people, money, coffee, donuts. Bleary-eyed and swollen from the trip, I welcomed the moving sidewalk and slowly drifted forward. The people who walked along the outside concrete sidewalk were faster than the motorized one. With some relief to my swollen ankles, I moved closer to the real America. People stood along the corridors waiting and straining to see all the arriving passengers. A man clutched a photograph in one hand and a straw hat in the other. A family of six, everyone exactly the same height and not very tall, bobbed up and down in a huddle like a pack of prairie dogs. At the luggage transport, I spotted the double straps of my satchel rounding the curve and pushed through the crowd to grab the worn leather handles. A line formed for customs. Soon it was my turn. The officer did not flirt with me this time, but he did look me straight in the eye.

“Are you here on business or pleasure?” he asked.

“I’m here for good.”

“Business or pleasure?”

“To stay.”

“Good for you, business or pleasure?” He was all business and a bit annoyed.

“I hope pleasure.”

“OK, pleasure it will be. Step back, please.”

As he opened my bag, I could smell the thick, damp air from the plaster walls of my Petersburg apartment in the liberated molecules. The customs officer did not appear to notice. The name on the tag on his pocket read Sgt. Green. In Russian green is
zilliony
. His name at home would be Sergeant Zilliony. I liked that better than Green. The first sign of spring at winter’s end when the flowers force themselves through the softening earth—
zilliony
. In America the color green is about money, greed, and envy.

He opened my photo album and turned it over. A dried bouquet fell out from between the pages. Oh, Trofim. He had given me the flowers with the lab coat at my graduation in Vilnius. He was my professor of physics and chemistry. He was brilliant in both, ran the Young Scientists Club, and was asked to make a speech at the graduation ceremony. Everyone envied my position as his assistant. We spent a lot of time side by side over experiments, but never touched. When his job ended in Vilnius, he was sent to the State University of Leningrad. I was returning home after my studies and was thrilled he would be there. When his family did not follow him to Leningrad for several months, we could not help ourselves.

The officer held up the flattened bouquet and asked, “You have pansies in Russia?”

“Yes, we grow many flowers, but those are not pansies. I believe they are violets.”

“Oh, a horticulturist, well isn’t that nice.”

“A chemist, actually. I just like flowers.”

Sergeant Zilliony prodded at the brassieres, upsetting many more of the precious particles from home. All the remnants of my Russia were being sucked through a black hole in this foreign atmosphere.

“Welcome to America. Good luck,” the customs officer said as he closed my bag.

“
Do svidaniya
,” I replied, but Sergeant Green had already moved on to the next foreigners and did not acknowledge my good-bye.

Next in line were a group of Italians with many suitcases and cardboard boxes. The officer watched as they lifted everything onto his examination table. Another uniformed person pointed me in the direction of yet another uniform. There my passport was scrutinized by a woman behind a high counter. I had to stand on the tips of my toes to see her. It felt good to stretch my ankles. She looked at me sideways.

“You are here to stay?”

“Yes.”

She said nothing and just stamped my passport. That was it. It was official—I was in America.

I went through double metal swinging doors, and on the other side, several men dressed in black pants and white shirts were holding signs with handwritten names. They spoke Russian.

“My son is going to engineering school.”

“Did you file for Social Security?”

“I am not eligible.”

“Take a class at the college.”

“Pottery, perhaps?”

They laughed and displayed their signs overhead as the area started to fill with people. I panicked for a moment hearing them speak Russian. Had I gotten on the wrong plane? No, I was here. The sign said “Welcome to the United States of America” in several alphabets, including Cyrillic. The tall glass windows, the smell of coffee and fried dough, and the smiling, toothy grins of the people in posters screamed
America
. When I finally stepped out into the bright, hot day and took a deep breath and tasted the steel-spiced air, I realized I was very far from home. The airport’s harsh smells, mixed with glaring sun at the curbside, made me wince. I sang my little song for comfort.

St. Petersburg to Moscow-ca-ca-COW!

Moscow, Kennedy, Port Authori-tay!

Excited and nervous, I wanted to do a little dance, but I managed to control my enthusiasm. I was in America and had to get to Port Authority. Port—I had some port once, and I enjoyed it very much. Authority—in the Soviet Union, it always made me suspicious. All the English words swimming before my eyes gave me vertigo. I tilted my head down between my knees to stop the spinning, and when I stood up and opened my eyes, in front of me was a bus with the name of my destination written on a sign across the top of its window. It was my first “lucky break” in America. I found a seat, and when the motor started rumbling, the diesel fumes reminded me of home. I clutched my precious valise on my lap. There were roads being built and many hotels along the route to Port Authority. The traffic was moving toward a skyline I had only seen in pictures. The man sitting next to me had a leg that twitched, and his suit smelled of oranges. He held his leg to stop it from bouncing up and down. He smiled at me, but I could not find a smile on my face yet—I was too nervous. I kept thinking of my song:

Bus to Hartford, three hours’ ride,

45 Star Lane, the taxi will drive.

“Breathe, Stalina, breathe,” my father’s voice whispered to me from sometime long ago. I missed him and started to relax.