“I learned to love the peasant’s work. Jews weren’t supposed to do that. And in tsarist Russia Jews weren’t even given land, because they were supposed to be lazy and good for nothing.
“I still have very good memories of Olgino. Because I am basically a country person. I like reading and music and all that. But I don’t like big cities. Not Manhattan, not Leningrad. To go to the opera, the museum, fine. But I like to be surrounded by trees, forest, grass, fresh air, fishing, and sunshine.”
We walk toward the gulf which restored his sanity.
We find ourselves back on Nevsky Prospekt, approaching the sienna-colored tower of the old city duma, or assembly. This is where first dates in Petersburg often begin, and my parents were no different. They met on the steps beneath the Italianate tower, where today, dozens of teenaged and twenty-something boys and girls are huffing away at cigarettes, tapping away on their phones. “When we first met I couldn’t understand what she was,” my father says. “It was as if some kind of orange had walked up to me.”
“I painted my cheeks with orange powder,” my mother explains. “My friend had a boyfriend who knew how to get anything. And so for New Year’s he got everyone Polish powder, which was orange. But we were all very proud of it. All of Leningrad was orange. Anything Polish was a big deal. Such pretty packaging.”
“So,” my father continues, “I was standing there and I saw this orange person. And I thought this is not one of ours! It must be a foreigner. She was more yellow than a Chinese.”
“I’m telling you it was the Polish powder!”
“I was wearing a hat that looked like—”
“A pierogi.”
“That looked like a pierogi. It was called a khrushchyovka. Gray and made of sheep. And I was also wearing a handsome French coat.”
“Very handsome,” my mother says, and I breathe in that sentence deeply. My parents still love each other.
On our way back to the hotel, they mention that there is only eighteen thousand dollars left on the mortgage of their Little Neck home and that they will pay this sum off within months. “Now we will be free!” my father says.
Now they will be free.
We are crossing Moscow Square.
They’ve put in gaudy fountains next to the pine trees where my father and I would play hide-and-seek. Beneath my Lenin there’s a temporary summer stage from which issues horrible thumping Russian pop, something about sun rays and “Get closer / closer to my heart.” There are Nike swooshes where the old gastronom used to be. Children who have no knowledge of the Great Leader scamper on and off Lenin’s podium, singing “la la la la la.” A lone boy in camouflage pants is texting with his mouth open. A man is holding a woman’s ass by the fountains, his bare shorts-clad legs wrapped around her. This is my sacred space, Moscow Square, June 2011.
We are approaching the building where we lived; beyond it, the Chesme Church. I am breathing hard. I have to pee. My father is telling me how Franklin D. Roosevelt ruined America.
We walk into the peeling entry way of our apartment house. The building is painted in the unappetizing colors of rose and dun, festooned with great loops of graffiti. Runty-looking kids are sitting by some ad hoc storage containers. The grass is overgrown with weeds and daisies.
“Where was the rocket?” I ask, curious about the rusty spaceship where I used to play Cosmonaut.
“The rocket was over there,” my father says, pointing at a standard-issue multicolored playground with swings and slides. A touch of sunlight, but no more, falls upon the courtyard where I used to spend my healthy days. The scraggly trees take what they can get.
“I always had nightmares about a big black steam pipe,” I say.
“That pipe, little son, was somewhere near here.”
“What were you afraid of?” my mother asks. “What did you imagine? You were afraid of tree roots when you were three.”
“Freud could have said a lot about all this,” I say, forgetting my audience. “He might have said it was about sexuality. The child growing up, afraid of becoming …” My mother grimaces. I stop talking.
Our former lives hang above us. Beige brick, casement windows, the occasional wooden or iron balcony, exposed gray piping, black electrical wires.
“It was big and dark,” my father says of the pipe.
“Like a rocket,” I say. “I always thought there was going to be an explosion. And we’d all be flung into the cosmos.”
“No kidding,” my mother says. “How could you even have imagined that?”
We return to the street, the facades of our megablock forming a pinkish wave flanked by a column of oaks.
“And over there, to the left, there was a church,” my father says.
The sidewalks have piled against each other like so many adolescent teeth. An unreformed ancient tram passes with a nineteenth-century European clatter. My mother is limping on the way to the church. My father jokes that she’s drunk too much beer at Little Jap (Yaponchik), the Moscow Square sushi joint with the casually racist name where we just ate lunch.
“I didn’t drink too much,” my mother protests, “I didn’t eat too much. I have a corn on my foot.”
“Can’t bring the old lady with us,” my father says. “We should have left her home.” I laugh, a braying sound. This is how they talk. This is how I never learned to talk. Not in Russian. Not in English. The supposedly funny banter with a twist of the knife. That’s what I have my novels for.
My father squeezes her with love. “Starukha [old lady],” he says, “let’s take her by the arms and legs and throw her in the garbage dump.”
“I’m not drunk. I drank half what you drank.”
“You drank all the beer.”
All of this is said in good humor and could go on for the rest of the afternoon. But it stops.
We are standing in front of it. The sky is the same dour gray as every other day, while it is the same pastry pink they serve at my mother’s favorite Café North on Nevsky. “What a pretty church,” I say. “This used to be the museum of … the naval fleet, something like that?”
“Yes, because it was the battle of Chesme,” my father says.
“I don’t remember anything!” says my mother.
Its three spires are poking into the northern murk, there’s a sandy lot in front of it. A drunk is sitting on a bench with his arms around one leg. My mother sits down on another bench to treat her corn. “Just go in the church by yourselves,” she says. “If there’s a toilet, tell me.”
“Do you remember we used to launch your helicopter here?” my father says.
“The helicopter, yes.”
“Many, many times we launched the helicopter. You liked it so much. And I did, too. I actually liked it, too.”
“Where did we find the helicopter?”
“We bought it! Where did we find it? It flew so high, almost to the windows.”
“I remember it got stuck one time.”
“No, I don’t remember that. I don’t think so. Many, many times we would launch it. You were so happy.”
We come upon a heavy wooden door. My father takes off his cap. Inside the church, a floodlit study in pink and gold. People are crossing themselves with a quiet vengeance. “They sure knew how to build churches in Russia,” my father says, impressed. “The most well known of the post-Byzantine style is the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod. I was there.”