And another dear someone will be left behind.
Lenin, my goose, my fierce bloody friend, my dreamer. What do you dream of now, on your pedestal at Moscow Square, in your mausoleum in actual Moscow?
Do you ever, would you ever, dream of me?
5. Article 58
The author’s mother at age eleven, with the worried adult gaze he will grow to know well. Note the pretty bow in her hair. The year is 1956, and the place is the Soviet Union.
“IT SEEMS LIKE you don’t really know me.
“You see me through your father’s eyes.
“And sometimes I think I do not know you.”
It is my mother’s birthday, and we are in the rotating restaurant atop the Marriott Marquis. My father and Aunt Tanya, my mother’s younger sister, have sat down at our table awaiting their truffle soup and steak medium to medium well, but my mother wants ten minutes alone with me. We are sitting by the ladies’ toilet in the restaurant’s nonrevolving core, watching women pass by in their piquant suburban outfits, so much flesh on a freezing December night.
My mother’s line of thought confuses me. I know she is anxious about the memoir I am writing. They both are. “Tell us, how many more months do we have to live?” my father will ask about the impending publication date. But how can she say we do not know each other? We have spent eighteen years living in such close proximity that any non-Jewish, non-Italian, non-Asian American exposed to even an hour of such closeness would raise up her blond locks to the sky and cry, “Boundaries!”
Do I really not know my mother? She was my friend when I was a little boy. I was rarely allowed any others, because she deemed them disease carriers who could aggravate my bronchial illnesses. Cousin Victoria, the ballerina — I remember staring at her through glass back in Leningrad, the two of us smudging the square pane of a French door with our palms, coating it with our breath. How we wanted to reach out and hold hands. She was also an only child.
And so, mother and son alone, trudging through lines to get water for their underground vacation hut in Crimea, to marvel at the Swallow’s Nest Castle near Yalta, walking hand in hand through innumerable trains, train stations, town squares, mausoleums — and always talking to each other, because my Russian was advanced and curious, and she could use an advanced and curious companion. In those days, I eased her anxiety instead of provoking it.
And as for seeing her through my father’s eyes? For so long, I have adapted his world-weariness, his sarcasm, his shutki (jokes). I have tried to be him, because I was a boy and he was meant to illustrate the next step in my evolution. “Whom do you love more, your mother or your father?” was the unfair question foisted upon me by my parents in Leningrad. Unfair, because I needed my mother, needed her company and her dark hair to braid during the moments when I was too tired of reading a book. But I felt the explosive nature of my father’s love for me, the centering role I was to play in his difficult life. You can either run toward such love or run away from it. Only recently have I chosen to do neither, to stand still and watch it take its course.
But as I have grown older I have chosen my mother’s life. The endless calculations, the worries, the presentiments, and, most of all, the endless work. The sunrise-to-sundown work, even in retirement, that keeps you from fully settling up with the past. The chicken cutlets she sold me for $1.40 a piece after I had graduated from college have given birth to a thousand such cutlets, a hundred thousand, a million, each clearly marked with a price tag. The fanatic attention to detail I’m sure my father never had, not as an opera singer, not as an engineer, I now call my own. As well as the attendant worry, the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of authority. As I stroll around the grounds of an upstate historic site, the mansion of FDR’s cousin-mistress, I am already preparing that all-important question for the elderly woman behind the counter: “I’ve bought tickets to the guided tour, but could I use the bathroom now, before the tour starts?”
My mother, her ambition stifled, channeled away by history and language, has given birth to my own. The only difference is: I have no God, no family myth, to cling to, no mythmaking abilities beyond the lies I tell on the page.
“Ours was such a nice family compared to your father’s,” my mother says. “We always used diminutives with each other, Ninochka, Tanechka. We had season’s tickets to the symphony.” When announced with such regularity, the Song of the Enlightened Loving Family, triumphing over adversity and despair, begins to sound like my father’s Song of Israel, which is always holy, always incapable of wrong. Am I mad to think that love is not so easy? Or am I missing the right gene for easy love?
“And sometimes I think I do not know you,” my mother says.
I have written close to twelve hundred pages of fiction, all of it translated into Russian, and hundreds of pages of nonfiction, much of it about the experience of being a Russian child in America, some of it trapped between the pages of this very book. Even if the fictional parts were not entirely autobiographical, shouldn’t they have served as at least a partial explanation for who I am? Or were the more important parts obfuscated by the shutki? Or perhaps, scarier still, the cognitive gap between mother and son is too great; the distance from here to there, from Moscow Square to my apartment near Union Square to this revolving restaurant in Times Square, cannot be closed with words alone.
Is hers but a less angry, more bewildered version of my father’s My son, how could he leave me?
As we walk over to the table, my father already itching to discharge his own shutki at me — the ten minutes I have spent alone with my mother have raised his jealousy and his ire — I think: What if it didn’t have to be like this? What if I were born to American parents instead?
It is not an altogether idle question. It almost happened. In a way.
My mother comes from two very different breeds of inhabitants of the mighty Rus. On her father’s side, the Yasnitsky clan is descended from twelve generations of Russian Orthodox churchmen hailing from the godforsaken Kirov Region lost somewhere in Russia’s vastness, somewhere between Helsinki and Kazakhstan. Photographs of my great-grandfather, a deacon, and his brother, the archpriest of a tiny village, offer a funny contrast to my Semitic features: Each looks as if the Holy Spirit has long decamped within his transparent blue eyes; each looks beautiful and content and so far removed from the acid baths of horror in which the rest of my ancestry used to take their morning dips. The cross hanging from Archpriest Yasnitsky’s neck could have been used to crucify a medium-sized animal like a fox terrier or a young capybara. The only physical features tying together my disparate ancestry are the full-blown rabbinical beards that both churchmen are sporting.
My mother’s half Jewishness often raises a pause among literary interviewers from Israeli and American Jewish publications. “And,” they ask, “Jewish on which side?” The subtext here is that Judaism is a matrilineal religion; hence if my mother’s mother were to be a gentile, I would be a “Jewish writer” in name only. I like to dawdle for a bit, to allow the worst to cross (quite literally) the minds of my Hebraic interlocutors, before revealing to everyone’s relief that it was my grandfather who was the big gentile and my mother’s mother was of Jewish stock.