You Are One of Them (11 page)

After only an hour or two, I’d retreat to Corinne’s apartment, just to feel invisible again. Every time I got home, I felt defeated. I wanted to be a fearless, adventurous traveler, but Moscow intimidated me. At home I boned up on Russian grammar. If I could just master the language, I thought, I’d feel less helpless. I perused recent issues of the
Moscow Times,
trying to make sense of the place. In addition to the world-news stories, there were a lot of pieces dedicated to adjusting to life in Russia. I read reviews of bars and restaurants endorsed by expats, recommendations for inexpensive cultural outings (the opera and ballet were a steal!), and local news items that had been translated from the Russian papers. Most of the news was bad. Moscow, I learned, led the developed world in the number of fire deaths. The current grain harvest was the smallest in thirty years. President Yeltsin and his first deputy prime minister, Anatoly Chubais, were trying to reform the country’s banking system in the wake of a liquidity crisis. Two American balloonists had been shot down and killed by a Belarusan air-defense unit. A government statement claimed that the balloonists were flying too close to a missile base. And Russia’s nuclear-safety watchdog voiced concern about supervision of the country’s military-industrial complex. In July, while in the hospital recovering from a heart attack, President Yeltsin had signed an order excluding civilian inspectors from military facilities. I decided not to mention this in my e-mails to my mother. I kept my missives upbeat.
“The architecture is amazing,”
I wrote
. “The women on the street wear super-short skirts even when it’s really cold.”

The most harrowing news I read was about a nine-year-old girl who threw herself in front of a Moscow train. Only a few lines were dedicated to the story, as if it weren’t so unusual. Definitely suicide, the paper said. No known motive. I found myself thinking about that girl a lot, wondering what kind of pain could drive someone so young to give up on life.

One day I returned home to find the housekeeper in the kitchen. She was barrel-chested and smelled like mayonnaise. She lit up when she saw me.
“Amerikanka?”
she said.

“Da,”
I told her.

She clapped her hands. She wanted to visit America. She wanted to learn English, she said. She said something else I couldn’t catch.
“Medlenno,”
I said. Slowly.

So she reduced her speed. “Nina,” she said, and pointed at her chest.

“Sarah,” I said.

She turned on the television set. There were two channels in English: CNN International and BBC World. She switched to the BBC, where a game show called
Ready, Steady, Cook
had just begun.

“Ya khochu ponimat,”
she said. I want to understand.

So I got my Russian dictionary and sat there on the sofa with her.

“Chto eto
?”
she’d say. What is it? She pointed at the ingredients, waited for me to unlock the mysteries of the recipe.

I flipped through my dictionary as fast as I could to find the answer. In some cases this required two leaps of translation, first into American English, then into Russian. The aubergine of the Brits on TV—and of my father, I realized—was eggplant to me and
baklazhan
to Nina. Courgette was zucchini in American English,
kabachok
in Russian. Nina was avid and spirited; when I mispronounced a word, she leaned close to see the book herself. We were a good team.

Ready, Steady, Cook
was on every afternoon. I began watching it even on the days Nina wasn’t at the apartment. The premise was simple: Two contestants each spent five quid on food, and then the competing celebrity chefs had twenty minutes to turn those ingredients into something palatable. The contestants would carry their groceries onto the London set, thrilled to be on the telly, and when they emptied the contents of their bags out on the kitchen counter, the chefs would study the ingredients and feign distress. “What am I going to do with a pineapple?” they’d say. But they always came up with something. They had to make do with whatever they got.

•   •   •

I
N THOSE BEWILDERING EARLY DAYS,
I dreamed often of Jenny. Sometimes we were in her pool, playing Marco Polo. My eyes were closed, and I was groping around the shallow end, trying to find her.
Marco,
I called
. Polo,
she said, in a voice that barely suppressed a laugh.
Marco. Polo
.
Polo
.
Polo.
But the closer I moved to the voice, the farther away she was, and then I wasn’t in a pool at all but in some kind of sludgy muck through which it was impossible to move.
Marco,
I called helplessly from the mire, but there was no answer, and I’d wake to find that my sheets were twisted around me because I’d been swimming in my sleep. It was embarrassing how unoriginal my subconscious was. But in the dream, she was so real that I could practically smell her. She was within reach, closer than I’d been to her in years, and her voice was urging me on—
Polo! Polo!—
as if she couldn’t wait to be found.

S
VETLANA AGREED TO MEET ME
by Patriarch’s Ponds.
“I will wear the red hat,”
she wrote
.
And on Saturday morning, at the appointed time, I found her sitting on a bench and wearing a red beret. She was slender and lithe, with the erect posture of a ballerina, and her legs looked especially long in her black miniskirt and tall boots. She wore a black wool cape with operatic proportions. In my corduroys and down vest, I felt crude. I felt a little better when I noticed a small hole in the left knee of her tights and observed that the elegance of her carriage was marred by her hair, which was brittle and streaked with peroxide. (“One thing the women here really need,” Corinne had said to me earlier, “is conditioner. All these bad dye jobs have totally wrecked their hair.”)

“So you are the Sarah Zuckerman,” Svetlana said.

“Ochen priyatno,”
I said. Nice to meet you. It had been two years since my last Russian class, and the words felt heavy and hard to maneuver.

“Govoritye po-russki?”
You speak Russian?

“A little,” I said.

I tried to reconcile the face before me with the girl pictured in Jenny’s book. The young Svetlana had been fuller in the face, and her eyes were brighter, more hopeful. She had a freshly scrubbed quality. This woman was narrow and gaunt, and her eyes betrayed nothing. She was beautiful in a damaged way. I stood in front of her, waiting for her to stand. But she pulled a pack of Marlboro Lights from her bag and lit a cigarette. She sucked in the smoke with vehemence, then raked her head and squinted at me. As she cataloged my features, I sat down beside her. I was careful not to sit too close; the foot of space between us was charged, tense.

“It is surprising,” she said in English.

“What?”

“You are sympathetic girl.”

“Simpatichnaya?”
I said.

“Da.”

“I think you mean pretty,” I said. “Not sympathetic. Sympathetic means kind.”

“You are not kind?” Her manner was abrasive.

“No. I mean, I am. I like to think so anyway. I try to be. But
simpatichnaya
isn’t ‘sympathetic’ in English. ‘Sympathetic’ means ‘kind.’
Simpatichnaya
is like the English for ‘pretty.’ Or ‘cute.’”

“
Da,
okay, pretty. I did not think you would be such pretty. I have seen picture, when you were young girl. You were not so—”

I cut her off. “That was a long time ago.” My awkward stage ended when I was about sixteen.

“
Nu, da
. How do you say? ‘Ancient history.’ But you were very plain,” she said. She seemed determined to get a rise out of me. “Although you are not fat. I thought Americans were fat.”

“Some of them are,” I said.

“You are not the potato?”

“What potato?”

“Potato on couch.” She blew smoke in my face.

“Couch potato,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

“But most people in your country are the couch potatoes. Lazy, fat . . .”

“Not as fat as Yeltsin,” I said.

“Boris Nikolayevich,” she said, “is the special problem.”

I wasn’t ready to drop the argument. “There are fat people everywhere. It has nothing to do with nationality. That lady isn’t exactly thin,” I said of a woman walking toward us with her dog.

The dog was scruffy and black, some kind of poodle mix, I thought.
“Malchik?”
Svetlana said to the woman holding the leash. A boy? It was strange to discover that Russians also asked each other the sex of their dogs. It was a practical question. Most dogs weren’t neutered, so vigilant owners needed to keep the intact males away from one another.

“Devochka,”
the woman replied. A girl.

The woman had a stout peasant build and a weary face. She might have been forty, maybe older. As Svetlana leaned over to pet her dog, the woman offered me a tentative smile. It was obvious I was foreign, but she didn’t treat me as a threat. I smiled back.

“Zdravstvuite,”
I said. Hello. Her head bobbed like a buoy.

The dog rolled over to let Svetlana rub her belly. I missed Pip. He was neurotic but comforting. Whenever I cried, he licked my face, and although I know he was drawn to the salt of my tears, something soulful in his eyes suggested genuine concern. He would lie next to me until I was okay. He lived until my first year of college. When I came home for Thanksgiving that year, the house seemed terribly empty without him. I kept hearing the ghostly echo of his toenails on the floor. My mother kept saying she was going to get another dog.

“Zaichik,”
cooed Svetlana as she scratched the dog under its chin.
Zaichik
means “bunny,” and I realized that it must be a term of endearment. Like honey bunny. The dialogues we had practiced in Russian class had not prepared me for actual conversations.
What did you do on Saturday?
our Russian professor would ask, stretching his words out like Silly Putty so that we could understand. We didn’t know how to say,
I drank too much at a bad party,
but we could say,
I gathered mushrooms
or
I took a walk in the park.
Our textbooks implied that Russians spent a lot of time gathering mushrooms and walking in parks.

“You like the dogs?” Svetlana said to me as the woman walked away.

“I love dogs,” I said.

“Ya tozhe.”
Me, too. “I have the dog. His name is Pushkin.”

“Like the poet,” I said.

“You know Pushkin? I thought Americans were not so cultured.”

“I was an English major,” I said. “I’ve read a lot of poetry.”

The truth is, I’d read only one Pushkin poem: “Ya Vas Lubil.” I Loved You Once. We had to memorize it in first-year Russian. “I loved you once: perhaps that love has yet / To die down thoroughly within my soul.” Apparently no English translation does him justice.

“The church where Pushkin married is here in center of Moscow,” she said. Pushkin was from St. Petersburg, but Moscow had its share of monuments to him. A Metro station bore his name.

“Your English is good,” I said. It was better than her letter suggested.

“I take the mistakes,” she said.
“Nu, spasibo.”
Thank you.

“You’re welcome,” I said. Then I said it again in Russian.

She deliberated, then said, “In Russian your accent sounds like you are from Gruziya, you know?”

“Georgia,” I said. I knew that this was an insult. Georgians and other people from the Caucasus were looked down upon.

“Da.”

“Like Stalin?” I wanted to remind her that someone from Georgia had once been in charge of the whole Soviet Union, even if it was with devastating results.

“Da, tochno.”
Yes, exactly. “You sound like Stalin.” She laughed. Her laugh was a girlish confection, the sort of giggle induced by intense tickling.

On the pond, ducks made serene circles, and on the other side a young couple walked hand in hand. The man wore a blue Adidas tracksuit. I could hear him coaxing,
“Pochemu nyet?”
Why not? I wondered if he was trying to get her into bed.

“In winter this is for the skating,” Sveta said. “The pond is frozen, the boys play hockey.”

“Must be nice,” I said.

“You will stay for winter?”

“Maybe,” I said. “If I can renew my visa.”

“You are married?”

“No,” I said, shocked by the question. “I’m only twenty-two. Are
you
married?”

“Divorced,” she said. Later I’d learn that many Russian women my age were divorced. They married at eighteen or nineteen, and the unions dissolved a few years later. To be unmarried at my age was to be an old maid.

“I have something to show you,” I said. I pulled Jenny’s book out of my bag.

Svetlana took the book and held it on her lap gently, as if it might break. With a sharp intake of breath, she extended a finger and traced the contours of Jenny’s face. And then her other hand moved over her own youthful image. She fell into a sort of reverie as her fingers drew a frame around the two girls in the photograph. “She was first American I met,” she said softly. “At first I was afraid,
ponimayesh?
”

“I understand,” I said.

“Americans were supposed to be danger. But she was
ochen
 . . . charming.”

“Yes,” I said. “Very charming.”

“One night,” Svetlana said, “I was permitted to stay with her in hotel. You cannot imagine how magical this was for me. A hotel! With the American! She removed her dress, and before she took the gown for sleeping—”

“Nightgown,” I said.

“Nightgown, yes—before she put on the nightgown, I look at her and I think, ‘This is
American
girl in her underwear.’ Do you know she had flowers on her underwear? The little blue flowers.”

I knew exactly which pair of underpants she was talking about.

“Soviet underwear was never so pretty. And I could not believe I was seeing American girl in her American underwear. She was like the . . .” She paused as she groped for a word. Then she mimed a horn extending from her head and looked at me for help.

“Unicorn?”

She smiled. “
Da.
Jennifer was like the unicorn.”

She was, I thought. I’d felt a similar sense of joyous disbelief when she emerged in my life. “Have you seen this book before?” I said.

Svetlana shook her head. She was rubbing the tip of her finger on Jenny’s pink cheek, as if the photo might release a wish-granting genie.

“There are more pictures of you in it,” I said. I knew the book so well that I could have told her exactly which pages those pictures were on. I had it memorized. I watched her turn the pages.

“We were just girls,” she said. “We believed everything they told us.”

“Who?”

“Our parents, our governments,” she said. “I believed in the party. I would stand when the Soviet anthem played on the TV. I had the picture of Lenin on my wall.” She laughed.

“And now?” I said.

“Now I have the picture of Kate Moss,” she said. “You know this British model?”

I nodded.

“After Jennifer returned to America, we promised to write the letters to each other . . .” she said. “But this was not possible. There were censors.” She closed the book with a sigh.

“Did you ever hear from her again?”

“Da,”
she said.

“When?” I said.

She returned the book without answering me. “
Ladno.
Now we will begin our tour. You don’t mind to walk?”

“No,” I said. “I like walking.” I stood and awaited direction.

“Krasnaya Ploschad,”
she said. We would start in Red Square.

•   •   •

S
VETLANA LIT ANOTHER CIGARETTE
as we walked along Bolshaya Nikitskaya toward the Kremlin.

“The plane that Jennifer was on,” I said, “was completely incinerated. No one could have survived that crash.”

“How you know she was on the plane?”

“Because,” I said. “The airport had a passenger list. There were names, there were official records.”

Svetlana snorted. “Official records! Officials are bribed to change documents. This is absolutely normal in Russia.”

“Do you have proof that Jennifer is alive?”

“Proof,” she said. “Like geometry,
da
?
”

“I came all the way here—” I said.

She cut me off. “And I will show you Moscow. Trust me.”

•   •   •

A
S WE ENTERED
R
ED
S
QUARE,
she said, “Unfortunately, is not possible to visit Lenin today. Mausoleum is closed.”

Russians start a lot of sentences with “Unfortunately”; they are used to explaining what is not possible. But she showed me the plaques marking people buried in the Kremlin walls, including Brezhnev and John Reed, the American who wrote about the 1917 revolution in
Ten Days That Shook the World.

“It’s like the picture of Jenny,” I said.

“Chto?”
What?

“There’s a picture of Jennifer standing right here, by these tombs,” I said. “In her book. Are we allowed to take photographs here?” I removed my camera from my backpack and cast a nervous glance at the soldiers in front of Lenin’s tomb.

“Is possible,” said Sveta. So I showed her how to use my Nikon, and we re-created the picture from Jenny’s book. I posed with my hands in my pockets under the plaque marking the grave of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

We weren’t the only ones taking pictures in front of the tombs. A bride fluttered in white next to her groom. It was customary, Svetlana explained, for newly married couples to visit a monument. It was hard to imagine a place less romantic than that wall commemorating the dead. But on our way through the Alexandrovsky Garden, we saw another pair of newlyweds by the even less romantic Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The groom looked sour and rotting; the bride kept fussing with his tie, as if she could straighten his mood.

In Russian the word for “married” is different for men and for women. Married women are
zamuzhem;
if you break down the word to its roots, it translates as “behind the man.” In college I had deconstructed Russian words as a mnemonic device. As a preposition,
za
can
mean “behind” or “after,” and as a prefix it begins verbs like those for “forget” (
To put the past behind you,
I’d tell myself as I flipped through vocabulary flash cards in the library) and “conceal” (
To put the facts behind closed doors,
I thought) and “envy” (
To see behind or look askance at
), to “fall silent,” to “imprison,” to “finish,” and to “close.” And yes, to get married. To get behind the man.

I asked Svetlana about this. She stopped and looked at me as if I were a curious specimen under a microscope. “You think too much,” she said. “This American feminism is no good. Is not sexy.”

I’ve never liked the word “sexy.” In high school my friends tried it on as if it were a costume a few sizes too big. Before Valentine’s Day they made stealthy trips to Victoria’s Secret, in hopes that a shock of red or black lace under their well-mannered clothes would persuade them that they had wild sides waiting to be unleashed. The boys at our brother school ranked us according to “hotness,” and as offended as we were by their rampant objectification of us as women, there was not a girl among us who didn’t secretly long to be on their hot list. The boys even devoted a page in their yearbook to the girls they deemed worthy of pinup status. It was a predictable group: athletic and sun-kissed; the hair was long, the breasts pert. We knew the boys weren’t worthy of passing judgment on us. And yet we had spent our lives chasing approval. We had been trained to get A’s. We were good at taking tests. We abided by rules and honor codes. We underlined our books, made careful observations in the margins, aced our SATs. And so these sons of statesmen, uniformed in blue blazers—they pulled off their ties at the end of the school day and swung them around like weapons—became another jury for us to please. Before we walked across the Cathedral Close to play fans at the boys’ lacrosse games, we brushed our hair, glossed our lips. They wore helmets; they brandished their lacrosse sticks like Vikings.