Before we left Leningrad, the émigré party line has informed us of an interesting quirk. While half of the Eastern Bloc would likely get up and move to Missouri if given the chance, the crazy Italians can’t get enough of communism. They can even get pretty violent about it. The newspapers are still screaming about the Brigate Rosse, the Red Brigades, and how an industrialist’s son had recently been kidnapped and had part of his ear cut off. Still, business is business, and anything Russian is huge. A fat big-bosomed former prostitute from Odessa stalks the beaches of our seaside Ostia, shouting, “Prezervatiff! Prezervatiff!” as she peddles Soviet condoms to the amorous locals. Given their poor quality, I wonder how many inadvertent future Italians owe their existence to her wares. Meanwhile, our neighbor, a timid Leningrad doctor, ventures out to the pier with a bale of Soviet heart medicine. “Medicina per il cuore!” he croons. The local police think he’s peddling heroin and pull out their pistole. The timid doctor, all glasses and big bald dome, runs off as the police fire warning shots after him. He is unwilling to let go of the giant umbrella he has used to shield himself from the warm Italian rain. The sight of the Jewish doctor and the umbrella escaping down the Mediterranean coast with the carabinieri in tow warms our hearts and provides endless conversations over the cheap chicken liver that constitutes most of our diet. (The prized tomatoes and balls of mozzarella are for once a week only.)
I am given a more lucrative, and more legal, sales line: compasses emblazoned with the yellow hammer and sickle against a red background. At Porta Portese, I walk around the perimeter of the bed-sheet that defines our stake, brandishing a sample compass and hollering at passersby with my now-healthy little boy’s lungs, “Mille lire! Mille lire!” A thousand lire, less than a dollar, is what each of the compasses costs, and the Italians, they are not animals. They see a poor refugee boy in a polka-dot-vertical-striped shirt, they will give him a thousand lire. “Grazie mille! Grazie mille!” I reply as the money is thrust in one hand and a little piece of Russia leaves another.
I am allowed to hang on to some of those mille lire notes, Giuseppe Verdi’s bewhiskered punim winking back at me from the currency. My obsession is guidebooks. Cheap English guidebooks, their spines a glob of glue and some string, with encompassing names like All Rome and All Florence and All Venice. I set up a little treasure chest of books in the tiny room we share in Ostia, and I try to read them in English, with limited success. The English-Russian dictionary is introduced to my world, along with the new non-Cyrillic alphabet. And then the words: “oculus,” baldacchino, “nymphaeum.” “Papa, what does this mean?” “Mama, what does that mean?” Oh, the pain of having an inquisitive child.
The American Jews are now flinging money at us with abandon (three hundred U.S. dollars a month!), the hammer-and-sickle compasses are really paying off, so we use the proceeds to take guided bus tours of Florence and Venice and everything in between. Brimming with All Florence knowledge I interrupt the lackadaisical Russian tour guide at the Medici Chapel. “Excuse me,” my nerdish voice rings out across the marble. “I believe you are not correct, Guide. That is Michelangelo’s Allegory of Night. And this is the Allegory of Day.”
Silence. The guide consults his literature. “I believe the boy is right.”
A rustle in the midst of the Russian refugees, a dozen doctors and physicists and piano geniuses among them. “That boy knows everything!” And then, most important, to my mother, “A delightful child. How old is he?”
I am lapping it up. “Six. Almost seven.”
“Remarkable!”
Mother hugs me. Mother loves me.
But knowing things is not enough. And neither is Mama’s love. In a church gift shop I buy a little golden medal depicting Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca. Haloed Baby Jesus is so porky here, so content with his extra protecting layer of flesh, and Mary’s beatific sideward glance drips with so much devotion and pain and understanding. What a lucky boy Jesus is. And what a beautiful woman is Mary. Back in Ostia, I develop a hideous secret vice. While my parents are off hustling Tchaikovsky sheet music or talking to the criminal Leningrad doctor and his young childless wife, I hide in the bathroom or somewhere lonely in the depths of our room. I take out the Madonna del Granduca and I cry. Crying is not allowed because (1) it’s not manly and (2) it can bring on asthma with all that snot. But, alone, I let the tears drop out of me with complete hot abandon as I kiss and kiss the beatific Virgin, whispering, “Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Santa Maria.”
The American Jews are paying for us, but the Christians are not content to let entire herds of confused, post-Communist Jews just wander past. There is a Christian center nearby, which we call the Amerikanka, in honor of the American Baptists who run it. They bait us in with some dried meat and noodles, only to show us a full-color film about their God. A reckless, know-it-all hippie motorcyclist is lost amid the Sahara Desert, he runs out of water, and, just as he is about to die, Jesus comes over to dispense precious water and career advice. The production values are terrific. In the bathroom of our flat I cradle the Madonna del Granduca. “I just saw your Son in the film, Santa Maria. He was bleeding so much. Oh, my poor Madonnachka.”
The next week the workers at the local Jewish organization decide to up the ante. They screen Fiddler on the Roof.
Beloved Grandma Polya arrives from Leningrad and, with her sparse hair and country smile, accompanies me on trips across Rome, walking me up and down the Tiber in my snazzy new Italian light coat, watching the sun do things to the enormity of St. Peter’s Dome or wondering at the Pyramid of Cestius rising out of the ancient ocher cityscape. “Grandma, aren’t pyramids supposed to be in Egypt?” The map of Rome is so worn there are thumb-bored holes where the Colosseum and the Piazza del Popolo should be, and I have truly destroyed the Villa Borghese. Grandma, sweating in the new heat, looks around apprehensively. More than fifty years before, she was born in a stifling Ukrainian village, and now she is in the Caput Mundi. “Grandma, did the Romans really vomit in the Baths of Caracalla?”
“Perhaps they did, little Igor. Perhaps they did.”
Grandma has other things to worry about. Her husband Ilya, my father’s stepfather, is a dour worker whose own best buddies in Leningrad have nicknamed him Goebbels. By Russian standards he is not an alcoholic, meaning he is not drunk from eight in the morning until pass-out time at night. Still Grandma Polya has had to carry him off the tram more than once, and more than twice he has beshat himself in public. Since his arrival, our small rooms in Ostia are loud with battle. One day I find a treasure on the staircase of Grandma’s building, a gold watch encrusted with possible diamonds. My father returns it to the Italian family living atop Grandma and Ilya, and they offer him a fifty-dollar reward. Puffed with pride, my father generously refuses the astronomic sum. The Italians counter with a five-dollar reward and a free trip to a local café for a cappuccino and some panini. “Idiot!” Ilya shouts at my father, with his little gopher-like head atremble and the perpetual web of spittle in front of him. “Good-for-nothing! We could have been rich! A diamond watch!”