“I don’t blame you, Alexi.”
Amalia sat down.
“I am moving out,” I told Amalia after Alexi had left and I heard the door to the basement slam shut.
“Where will you go, Princess America?”
“I’ll live at the motel.”
“Ungrateful capitalist!”
“Better to be a thief?” I asked.
“Those are Soviet bras; they belong to us all. By the way, I spoke with Olga this afternoon. She said to call her.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You did not give me a chance; you were so upset about your silly bras.”
“Those are my bras. The money is mine.”
“Get out of my house.”
I opened my pink wallet and pulled out three twenty-dollar bills.
“Here, take some Andrew Jacksons, seventh president of the United States, my adoptive country.”
“He killed a man in a duel for saying something nasty about his wife.”
“You studied for the exam?”
“The test is stupid. They ask you if you have ever committed a crime for which you were not arrested.”
“It’s a trick question,” I said.
“I take survival very seriously,” she added.
“And what about stealing? That’s a crime.”
“I guess I would have to lie to pass your American citizen test. I’d trust a liar less than a thief. Call Comrade Olga.”
I took a breath and remembered that Amalia was also a child of the siege, only she stayed in Leningrad with her parents when I was sent away to Camp Flora. Many people perished around her. For the duration, she did not wear her makeup. Face powder was used to fatten up scraps of wallpaper to make gruel. People would stare at the mark on her face, and that’s when she would steal a watch or a ring. The black market was stronger than ever during those nine hundred days.
“A diamond ring could get you a loaf of bread,” she once told me.
“What’s the sixty dollars for?” she asked.
“Partial rent—it’s only the first week of the month. Take it.”
I went to pack my bag. The stairs creaked as I climbed, and my sneakers sounded like a hungry baby bird as they hit linoleum. Shoes with rubberized soles are a wonderful invention. With them on, even when I am feeling low, my feet are up.
My room, my terem, had a single cot and a bedside table with a lamp with a monkey eating a banana on the base topped with a yellow and white striped shade. When I first moved in it made me laugh. Everything in the house was oddly thrown together. The cuckoo clock. The one wooden blue chair in the kitchen. Nothing matched. Could it be that everything in the house was stolen? Many of the things I needed to pack were on a set of shelves Amalia made for me. The shelves were separated and propped up with various objects: a cement cupid figurine, a broken stereo speaker, and several flowerpots. I slid my suitcase out from under the cot and opened it. It was empty except for one of the bras that Alexi had left untouched. Size 85D—in America that’s a 44D. A good-sized brassiere. He’d removed the porcelain cats from the cups of the bras and tucked them into the side pockets. I was glad they were safe. I wouldn’t sell this bra. I might use it for decoration in one of the rooms at the motel. A “Lingerie Fantasy Room” would be very enticing, I thought. My nose tingled. There was a tickling remaining scent of home—Petersburg—lingering in the shadows of the suitcase.
I began removing things from the shelves. On top was the photograph of my mother and father on the porch from when I was thirteen. The glass in the frame was covered with a thin film of dust. I drew circles in it revealing my mother’s hands, then her face, under the dust. A tear fell from the corner of my right eye and landed on my father’s face. I passed my thumb through the droplet to clean the rest of the glass. I had never noticed before that my mother’s right index finger was bandaged, and there was blood seeping through the gauze. I don’t remember my mother cutting her finger, but it was probably still throbbing when the picture was taken. She made a cherry pie the day the photograph was taken. Maxim visited and ate pie with us. Amalia and I played cards. My father read his leather-bound copy of Julius Caesar, the same one I was packing from c shelves. As Maxim walked up the steps of the porch, my father read a quote from the play, never lifting his eyes off the page.
“Good evening, Leonid,” Maxim had said that evening as he came up the steps. “Reading your favorite play, I see.”
My father did not answer.
“Hello, Maxim, would you like a glass of tea?” my mother asked him.
“Tea, thank you, Sophia,” Maxim said to my mother.
My father said nothing, got up from his chair, and went into the house. Amalia had put down her last card, winning the hand. “Let’s play another,” she said.
We played, but I was distracted and lost the next three hands. I could hear my father pacing and my mother rattling pans in the kitchen. Maxim sat on the steps and smoked cigarette after cigarette. The smoke filled the porch. My mother stepped through the smoke cloud with Maxim’s tea and a piece of pie. She pulled the cigarette from his mouth so he could eat, and he watched as she drew the smoke into her lungs and released it around him. He devoured the pie but never took his eyes off her. They walked off the porch into the evening, sharing another cigarette. Amalia won another hand. My father stayed inside. My mother returned alone. In the meantime, I had finally won a hand.
“You girls should be in bed by now,” she said.
“Stalina finally won. One more hand so we can tie,” Amalia pleaded with my mother.
“You’re a good friend, Amalia. Now go to bed, girls,” my mother said.
“Where’s your father?” Amalia asked.
“Asleep in his chair,” I told her.
My mother went inside.
“Girls, come in now. I’ll let you skip your baths if you go right up to bed.”
We left our playing cards and went upstairs. In the living room my father was unconscious in his chair with his teacup knocked over in his lap. There was a stain on his pants where the liquid had soaked into the worsted wool. My mother was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, smoking another cigarette. I could not see her face in the shadows.
When we got upstairs, Amalia asked, “Your parents don’t touch anymore, do they?”
I could not remember the last time I saw them touch each other.
“They don’t need to touch,” I told her.
“Everyone needs to touch,” she said.
I finished packing and went downstairs. Amalia was in the basement with Alexi. They were having an argument. I picked up the phone to call Olga in Russia, but the smell of cigarettes and gardenia perfume on the receiver made me sick to my stomach. Bacco was waiting in a car to take me back to the motel. My new home.
I reached Olga from the office phone on the first try. She had been to the rooming house earlier in the day and learned the details of my mother’s passing from one of her roommates.
“I hope you don’t mind, but I told them I was you,” she said.
“Who did you speak with?”
“Ludmilla was her name. She said she thought I was shorter and had darker hair. I told her I had only recently become a blond and was wearing heels.”
“I remember Ludmilla. She had the cot across from my mother, and her son used to bring her chocolates.”