“Don’t let go of me.” Because sometimes it may seem like I have. Because instead of my fighting back, instead of my indignation, what he hears is silence.
When he tells me that one of my postcollege girlfriends is too fat, that he’s personally affronted by her weight, although he does “respect her right to exist,” there is silence.
When my mother tells me, before I am to go off on a trip to India, that I shouldn’t get any vaccines “because they will give you autism,” that canard of the extreme right wing, there is silence.
Silence instead of the yelled rebuttals, the peeing on the grave, which they’re used to, which feels familiar and pee warm. “It would have been better if you had told me you were a homosexual,” my father said when I told him I had started psychoanalysis. Beyond the post-Soviet distrust of the practice — mental hospitals were used by the Soviet state against its dissidents — there is another fear. You can fight with your gay son, tell him he is a disgrace in your eyes. And he will fight back, will beg for your love. But what do you tell someone who is silent?
And within that silence, time itself has stopped. Within that silence, the words hang in the air, fluttering in Cyrillic, not entirely painless but without the power to bring back the small, unquestioning child at their mercy.
Don’t get any vaccines. They’ll give you autism. Don’t write like a self-hating Jew. Don’t be a mudak. Soon you will be forgotten. How can I not hear the pain in that? His pain? Her pain? How can I not publicize that pain?
And how can I not travel, across eight time zones, to its source?
* The image of Pamela Sanders plus a weapon pointed at a head is what in creative writing classes is called “foreshadowing.”
† And, I might add, if the family isn’t finished, then the writer is.
25. The Church and the Helicopter
Author and Lenin rekindle their bromance on St. Petersburg’s Moscow Square.
I’M BACK IN RUSSIA. It is June 17, 2011, the temperature is cold and gloomy, but with some outlandish bursts of warmth. In other words the temperature and the way I feel about the country of my birth are one and the same. Since my first return to Russia in 1999, I’ve been back almost every other year, dutifully taking down everything I see, categorizing each kernel of buckwheat and pale sheet of salami, testing myself by walking into the Chesme Church where the maquettes of gallant eighteenth-century Turkish and Russian fighting ships once faced off in their eternal Anatolian battle. I’ve shared vodka shots with weeping policemen in Haymarket Square, slipped on innumerable patches of ice, nearly been sliced in half by a Georgian ruffian; in other words, done all the things one normally associates with a trip to the former Soviet Union.
I am on the morning’s first speedy train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The train is called the Sapsan, named for the mythical peregrine falcon, the world’s fastest animal, and designed by the equally mythical engineers of Siemens AG. I am hungover to the point where even the gentle German rocking of the Falcon brings on serious flashes of nausea. In the past few years I’ve been careful about my drinking. But on the night before my current Moscow-Petersburg journey, spurred on by that most lubricated of creatures, an aging Russian intellectual, I drank myself to the point where I wedged myself into the cupboard of a Moscow bar. I remember a pleasant young American television executive working on some suspicious-sounding international project telling me, “Wow, you really do drink like a Russian.”
Afterward, blankness, the flash of a hipster hotel on a trendy island off-shore from the Kremlin, a hundred-dollar last-minute cab to the train station, and here I am in the biznes-class carriage of the Falcon, a thirty-eight-year-old man about to start writing his first memoir. Which is what brings me to St. Petersburg in 2011. Even as I am inching my way between Russia’s two biggest cities, my parents are charting their path across the Atlantic. My mother has not been to Russia in twenty-four years, since her mother died, and my father in thirty-two years, or from the time he left the Soviet Union in 1979.
We are all coming home.
Together.
A wind whips the Falcon into the station. It is early summer, but the St. Petersburg skies are gray, that unremitting gray of upstate New York in winter. The days are almost at their longest, the light is flat and cruel; soon, there will be no real sunset. At night, by moonlight, the sea wind sends the Finnish clouds on secret missions over the city.
I’ve booked two sleek hotel rooms across from the train station near Uprising Square for me and for my parents, but when I show up, tired and haggard from my insomniac trip to Moscow (its purpose: an article about a Muscovite magazine called Snob), I am told my room isn’t ready. To my exhaustion is added a strand of fear. What if I don’t get any sleep before my parents arrive? They have come at my request, have traveled to a country they don’t particularly want to remember. Over the years I’m the one who’s returned so many times, have penned so many nightmarish scenarios about the place, and now I’m the one who has to protect them. But from what? From memory? From skinheads? From the treacherous wind? All I know is that I need to be my best for them. My mother is in her mid-sixties and my father in his early seventies. By Russian standards, they are already advanced pensioners. Finally given the room key, I plop down on all that cheap blond wood, large TV flashing images of all the other properties owned by the hotel chain, which, par for the global course, is based in Minneapolis but administered out of Brussels. Two tidy Ativan tablets touch the tip of my tongue, and the usual ragged, unsatisfying, chemical sleep approaches.
The terrible marimba of the phone alarm. The fumbling for the toothbrush. The elevator descends with me partly in it. And then they are standing there before me in the busy lobby, two skinny people hemmed in by fat provincial tourists representing several countries. “Hey!” I shout, ready for an embrace.
“Little son!” my mother shouts. And I am smaller.
“Little one,” my father says. And I am smaller still.
“Welcome,” I say, for some reason, in English. And then in Russian: “Are you tired?” And as soon as the first words of Russian—Vy ustali? — get an exit visa out of my mouth I recoil from myself, shocked by hearing my own goofy adolescent bass around my parents. Granted, with my ever-growing American accent, I do not sound entirely native when I govoryu po-russki with cabdrivers, hotel clerks, or even my good Petersburg friends. But right now I sound like a child just getting his mouth around his first Russian words. Or is it because I’m trying to speak to my parents with grown-up authority? Trying, against all reason, to be their equal?
How much time have I spent in the last twelve years running up and down this exhausted, melancholy city, retracing their steps, trying to somehow make them my own. And then with the first Russian words out of my mouth, I realize the truth of the matter. It’s not possible to make their lives my own. While my mother and father are here, this is their country. And so my responsibilities lighten. And so I realize that what I have to do for the next week is to ignore my own goofy Russian bass and, simply, to listen.
To the Minnesota tidiness of their room, my mother has added her own tidiness, a system of packing of infinite complexity, so that most of the contents of their three-story house have been condensed and magically transported to the old homeland. Plastic bags beget plastic bags, there are umbrellas, rain jackets, hoods, money pouches, and, from tomorrow’s breakfast table, yogurts, heavy bottles of water, a range of fortifying snacks. She will leave the hotel as provisioned as an astronaut testing the first reaches of an inhospitable planet. In her bones, this may still be her country. But she will not touch it with her hands the way I do, trying to lyricize the filth and the decay.