“What, here, at Camp Klorp?” Klorp means bedbug.
“Stop it!”
“How about Camp Siege?”
“The young ones will write their parents, ‘Dear Uttyets and Mart, Having a lovely time, hope all is well, don’t eat Uncle Vanya if you can help it. Your sweet Misha from Camp Siege.’”
“Vanya, please.”
“OK, Camp Flora, just for you, Tanya. But where’s your sense of irony? Not very Russian of you.”
Tanya had long blond hair and spent her days chopping wood. She was strong and hugged each one of us every day. It was a comfort. Vanya tended a herd of goats near the camp. He smelled like those goats and had the biggest, roughest hands I have ever seen. I listened while they played cards, keeping very still so that when I fell asleep I would not fall off the bed or disturb my sleep mates during the night. We were always four or more in a bed. When someone near me would start to cry, which happened often, I would try so hard to hold it back. I tried so hard to be strong.
No one escaped the siege. Bela and Leo were brothers who always shared a bunk. Neither one ever said a word. They ate their meals under the long table and refused to sleep with anyone else. For the rest of us, the bed assignments would change almost every night, so if someone had bony elbows and knees or foul breath, you only had to tolerate them once or twice a week.
“Flexibility, adaptability, and strength—these are the things you will learn at Camp Flora,” Tanya told us almost every night before she gave out the bunk assignments.
“Leave Bela and Leo alone,” she would say if someone was making fun of them.
One time Rakia, an angry student right out of Herzen University, tried to force them to separate. She was always mad about having to abandon her studies. “It will be good for them,” she said in her bossy style.
When they were separated, Leo would not stop hitting his head against the floorboards and Bela obsessively ate the torn threads of a blanket.
“I told you, leave them alone,” Tanya said. “I will take care of them.”
“But they’re not being good Communists,” Rakia said, storming out.
“That’s not my concern, Rakia. They are children; let them be.”
Tanya disappeared one day. Who knows why? In those days it could have been anything. Luckily, Rakia did not take over.
It was two and a half years before I saw my parents again, and at first I did not recognize them or Leningrad. The city was a charred skeleton. My parents were not much better, their faces gaunt and bodies thin as branches. It was my father’s smile that brought me back. Even though he had lost a front tooth, I recognized his crooked smile and plump lips. My mother managed a feeble smile through her tears. Neither could pick me up. I was healthy and put my arms around my mother’s legs and tried to lift her. She flinched when I touched her. There was great distance between us.
“Stalina, it’s not you. My body hurts from being so tired,” she said.
Hunger exposes the nerves. Mother bruised easily and was very sensitive to the slightest touch or any sound louder than a light switch. It wasn’t until I was older that she told me how they survived.
“We made bread by mixing face powder, sawdust, and tooth powder and fried it all in lipstick for flavor,” she explained with her eyes closed.
I was ten years old and asked, “What happened to the stars and crowns wallpaper in our hallways?”
“We stripped it all down and scraped off the glue to make gruel,” she continued. “I’d let a ball of it sit on my tongue for a long time.”
“How did you swallow it?”
“Imagination. I’d envision the most luscious piece of chocolate cake. I closed my eyes, and when I could smell the cake as if it had just been baked, I quickly swallowed.”
“Mmm, let’s have some chocolate cake,” I once suggested.
“Achh no, it makes me think of eating the wallpaper glue.”
My mother’s tastes ran to the plain and simple. Soda crackers, boiled chicken, and vodka.
Chapter Ten: Svetlana and the Crow
I had been at the Liberty for more than two years, and Svetlana for almost six months. Each of us was at home here now, perhaps strange to say. The motel was very quiet this afternoon. I got Svetlana and brought her into the office. Mr. Suri liked to play with her.
Caw! Caw!
That crow was very protective of Svetlana. I’d never seen anything like that. She did not fly away when I picked up the cat.
Caw! Caw!
“Svetlana, you are a feisty kitty. Come here. Mr. Suri is back. Let’s get back to the office.”
As I scooped her up, I saw the remnants of Mr. Suri’s drawings in the dirt under the pine trees. He had drawn a map of Windsor Avenue with arrows pointing in several directions and circles around squares that seem to be the other motels. I wondered what sort of plan he was thinking of. The wind had stopped as it often did at this time of day. The trees here reminded me of Lake Ladoga near my family’s dacha in Karelia. Pine trees surrounded the water. There was always a bed of fallen needles three or four inches thick that we would walk through to get back to the house. A soft scent of pine followed us as we stirred up the ground in our bare feet. Sticky bits of sap would stick to our toes and heels. I would do a little jig to show off my needle-covered feet, and my parents would clap out the fast rhythms of the barnya, a folk dance that builds to an uncontrollable frenzy.
Here at the motel we used a very strong pine disinfectant called King Pine to clean the rooms. It hung heavily in the air and burned the eyes, but ultimately did the job of masking the smells of spilled liquor in the carpets and cigarettes in the drapery. My dream was to scent every room to match its fantasy scene. After all, I was an expert in the arena of aromas. The smell of rain and wet roses for “Gazebo in a Rainstorm” and cotton candy for “Roller Coaster Fun Park.” At our lab in Russia, the manufacturing of scents became a cover for the vats of arsenic and anthrax we had in storage for covert operations. Make the poison smell sweet, even if it was an odorless killer like anthrax. I could be arrested for revealing such secrets. Most of the people working in the lab did not know we were making anything poisonous. I knew what was there because the technicians had to come to me for the chemical compositions and the delicate balances needed to stabilize each vat of poison and to create its camouflage bouquet. We mastered over one hundred scents. In addition to the sweet smells of lingonberries and such, we found ways to make the scents of freshly printed newsprint and an electrical storm. Of them all, my favorite was that of freshly baked bread.
“Svetlana, I bet you’d like a room scented with catnip or tuna, wouldn’t you, little kitten?”
Mr. Suri came into the office; he looked agitated. There was something about him I found very attractive. It had been a long time since I had felt anything for a man, but he intrigued me. I wanted to know more about him. I liked watching Mr. Suri walk. He had long legs, and his slacks danced around them as he moved. He was graceful, and I thought that he must be a good dancer. I like that in a man.
“Mr. Suri, how was your day?” I asked, coming in from outside with Svetlana in my arms.
“In order to be approved for a new septic system, it seems I have to join the Kiwanis Club.”
“I am familiar with these kinds of things. It was typical in Russia.”
“I’m not a joiner,” he said. “I just want a decent place for the you-know-what to go.”
“Mr. Suri, we have a situation.” I attempted to tell him about the comatose customer.
“We will have a very bad situation if I can’t properly deal with people’s—”