The school’s first bell disrupted my trance. I’d forgotten where I was meant to be.
“Good-bye, Stalina,” Stalin spoke from the poster. “Go to your classes; I’ll wait here for you. Go now—study hard and be a good young Communist.”
I sat down at my desk, still in a state of shock, looking around at my classmates to see if they noticed how I’d changed. No one could know the fire in my heart. Olga was busy fixing the ribbon in Amalia’s hair, and Yuri, the class comedian, was performing his version of Swan Lake when our teacher, Mrs. Tolga, scolded him mid pirouette and sent him to sit in the back even though we all could see he made her laugh along with the rest of us.
The class settled, and all was quiet except for the crack of our opening notebooks. The lesson on the board in bold block letters read: WRITE A POEM ABOUT HOW COMMUNISM HELPS ONE AND ALL.
I could only keep thinking, “Stalin spoke to me—he spoke to me.”
“Take me, I’m yours,” I whispered and scribbled over and over in my notebook. On another page I drew a copy of the poster, this time including myself at Stalin’s side, our collective gaze seeing past the streets and buildings of Leningrad to the fields and factories soon to be nourished with our country’s newfound power and wealth. My love was so new, and myself and my country so terribly naïve.
Now, almost fifty years later, I looked above the billboard advertisement for imported coffee and watched as the clouds moved toward Finland. The next day I would be in a plane passing through similar clouds on my way to America.
As I continued home, I made up a song with the directions Amalia had sent me to her home in Connecticut, USA. I sang them with a boogie-woogie beat and swayed my hips inside my long wool coat.
As I walked through the streets, the buildings loomed, and I imagined their dismay regarding my departure.
The doorways, windows, and back alleys whispered behind my back, “How dare you leave us after all we’ve been through.”
I answered, “You can’t hold me anymore. There is nothing for me here. America wants me.”
I touched the sides of the buildings and felt every crack and bump in the sidewalks and cobbled streets. This brokenhearted city would have to survive without me. It would be best for both of us. I tried to explain.
“I do love you, but it’s not practical for us to be together.”
“That’s a lame excuse, Stalina,” the sewer gate sputtered up at me.
I stomped my foot on the grating and said, “Leave me be. You know nothing!”
I turned a corner onto St. Isaac’s Square. The sun reflected off the cathedral’s golden dome. It was a beautiful sight to behold. I unbuttoned my coat to let the sun warm my chest. The angels surrounding the dome held torches that would be lit again for the first time in forty years that Easter. Silenced for so long, they took this opportunity to speak their minds.
“Sweet Stalina, don’t leave us,” they sang down to St. Isaac’s Square.
“I love you, but don’t cross me now. Everything has changed. I can’t stay,” I tried to explain again.
“Dirty Jew!” one of the angels screamed.
“Who speaks like a Cossack?” I wanted to know.
“Jew. Jew. Jew. Always a Jew!” they kept chanting.
I pulled my fur hat down over my ears and made my way home, where my bag was already packed.
Chapter Three: Stamped in Red
Amalia had written to me, “Bring something to remember home. Bring something to sell, and wear as much clothing as possible on the plane. You want to have space in your bag for anything to be used for commerce, to sell or barter. It is part of survival in America. Fly to Moscow from Petersburg. The flight from Moscow to US will cost less, even with the connection.”
At the airport outside Petersburg the next day, the customs officer found my packing job quite amusing, commenting, “Looks like you need an engineer’s degree to pack a bag like this.”
“My degree is in chemistry. It is all about how things in the universe fit together, like a well-packed valise.”
“Your universe is a curious place,” he said as he ran his fingers along the top of the bras I had packed.
He touched everything in my bag. Under each of his fingernails was a line of black dirt collected from digging into other people’s possessions. I had systematically packed my double-strapped leather valise with the twenty-four brassieres, sizes 75B to 85DD. Sized in our metric system, I hoped these undergarments would make American ladies feel grand; 34B to 44DD is otherwise unimpressive. I used several of the larger sized bras to protect my collection of porcelain cats. The oldest one, a Siamese, was a present from Olga for my ninth birthday. Underneath the cats I had packed my father’s copy of Julius Caesar, his favorite play, and a leather-bound copy of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which he read to me every year on my birthday when I was young. A photo album with pictures of my family and friends lay at the bottom of the bag, along with framed photos of my grandparents cushioned by my grandmother’s fur hat and gloves. I’d heard the American winters were bad—not as cold as Leningrad, but very wet. Poetry books by Anna Akhmatova had stockings and other undergarments wrapped around them. Into five pairs of socks I packed ten Russian matryoshka dolls, which I understood to be popular in America. I find them disturbing, as they show how easily a woman can be reduced to practically nothing. On top I laid my lab coat, which I’d received as a gift from Trofim, my chemistry professor from university. My lover.
The customs man read my name on the passport. “Stalina, that’s a lovely name.”
He obviously did not go to school with me. My fellow students would belittle me about my name. They would say, “Take another name, Stalina. How about Lotte or Anna or Tatiana? Millions died under Stalin. You are not his namesake anymore. Take this monster away from your life.”
“I will never change it,” I told them. “My name is our past.”
Perhaps this customs officer was a supporter of Stalin. There are those who wish for a return to Stalinism, and to honor the general for stopping the Nazis. In Petersburg today a small group stands in front of the Grostiny Dvor department store on Nevsky Prospekt with sandwich boards and petitions disseminating information for their cause. Occasionally an argument erupts between them and passersby, but in general they are just thought to be crazy and are whispered about in the cafés.
I passed him my papers. There are no lies on my passport. A capital letter J stamped in the lower left corner indicates I am a Jew. When I left, the government made it easy for Jews, especially an oldie like me, to leave. The customs inspector handed back my passport and made a slow, deliberate stroke with his forefinger along the top of my hand. I took my bag and smiled out of relief at passing the inspection. As I walked through the gate, I felt his stare on my heavily padded behind swinging from side to side like a cushion-covered pendulum.
I did not sleep and mostly cried during the twelve-hour flight to America. The clouds surrounded us like steam at my local banya. Instead of glistening bodies revealed in the breaks of heavy mist, I saw a landscape of clouds and ice-capped mountains as we crossed over Finland and then Greenland, where the sun’s light was tippling off the waves of the Atlantic. When we lost the sun and the moon rose, the dark waters looked like scores of crystal chandeliers lighting our way. The sun had come up when we left Petersburg, and I saw it rise again as we passed over an island the stewardess called Prince Edward. While in the air, I sorted through memories and divided them like the test tubes I once cleaned in the lab. Long, short, cracked, hard to see through, lined with residue, all dropped into the washbasin of my brain, bobbing to the surface when a path was made clear, or simply pulled up from below with a snap of my rubber-gloved hand.