by Paul Rogov.
It had been quite some time since she had eaten, the first light of morn, before she saw her husband off at daybreak, before her hot, sipped pomegranate tea would swirl on her tongue and soak through a buttered slice of Russian rye. She would write letters that morning. Letters to her sister in Kiev. Notes to herself. Letters to her son. She had spent seventeen years of her life devoted to raising Vova, but Vova was in college now; there was no going back; and, she eventually found herself in a familiar position: on her hands and knees, in the kitchen, on the tile floor amidst scattered, granular archipelagoes of Comet. She twisted a rag. Clean, she thought. Water dripped down on the tile. Clean hard, she thought. She was crying. After she finished scrubbing, she got up and then walked into the closet and retrieved the vacuum. She then shut the door.
Uncoiling the vacuum cleaner cord, she looked at the impressionist paintings on the wall, the Chagall print, between the dining room and the den, which hung there like some icon, which was ironic, or rather odd to her because she had always wanted to be a Jew before she converted to Judaism. She vacuumed the downstairs—dining room, hallway, den—then dragged the vacuum upstairs, and began to clean a four-bedroom house, an apricot-colored house, their first. Snippets of the past infiltrated her consciousness.
“Before I lived this life, Mama, I walked on the sun,” said Vova, who was three in her memory, in their first apartment in Los Angeles right after they came to America.
Vova grinned, covered his grin with both hands. She smiled, brushed the bangs of his curls away from his brows. He grinned at her almost toothlessly.
“I know you what you and Papa do when you say you are asleep.”
Yes, she could remember: “Me and Papa? What do you know?” She gazed at him.
“You are drinking champanskaya!” Vova insisted.
“He wants to play,” said Igor, her husband. “Isn’t it always the same?”
“Vova, how you speak!” She looked at Igor, earnestly, then added: “Listen to him.”
For three months and running, they had lived on Midvale, on the second floor of a five-story building. She would awake; she would make them breakfast. The apartment building, constructed in the fifties, with ocher stucco framed in chestnut trim, looked like a mighty H: a walk-bridge ran between two wooden buildings, within which apartments, two by two, neighbor’s door by neighbor’s door, were situated; there was a driveway that lead down to the garage beneath the building.
Across the street, down the street, stood Inna’s dusty, tailor shop, where Soviet Jews and Mexicans impaled bobbins onto sewing machines and pressed a metal pedal with white-socked feet, down below their work-desks.
Inna was a heavy-set woman, a friend of Igor’s family back in Minsk: it was she and her husband, Arkady, who let them stay with them before Igor had enough money to put down a deposit for a one-bedroom apartment. Every morning, before the mist would peel off, Igor would walk to the tailor shop to get a ride to work from Arkady.
Huffing in cool air, Igor saw the other immigrants standing there, on the sidewalk, looking for work, watching cars drive by, hoping one of those cars would stop while they were parting with their wives. The young men embraced their wives, kissed them. And then, the men—most of them between the ages of twenty and twenty-five—would stroll across the street, light up cigarettes and sip coffee, while many of the wives would go into Inna’s tailor shop, where they sowed for hours, separated garments, ironed, washed, repaired, folded, later to meet up with their husbands at dusk.
Igor worked through the afternoons.
Often times, before supper, he studied.
It was a particular day in May, perhaps, on the first, though there was no holiday. Igor had gone to the public library. She and Vova were going to meet up with him after he finished studying, so they went to the park by the library. Yoked chains of the swings tinkled. “Like this?” some kid cried. “It’s easy!” A tiny foot landed into a hopscotch box. A young boy donning a backwards base-ball cap, splayed his fingers, leaned down on a hooked knee, snatched up a pebble, then vaulted, boxes by boxes, to the other side. “Vova, be careful,” his mother said. He gripped her knee, relayed a chewed object to her. A cool wind picked up and cut across his face as he slipped off her lap. She dropped an apple core into a white paper bag, stood up, crumpled it, tossed it underhanded into the trash-can, sat back down, then inched a blanket over her thighs.
For an hour they sat there, beneath the bouncing branches of a birch tree, across from the library where Igor studied. Shifty-footed, on the side-line, the adults gawked at the children on the playground, though did not applaud. It was lunch-hour for slow children. With gnarled fists, engaged kids with syndromes smacked their breast-plates in celestial mutiny, sitting on concrete dragons and concrete dolphins: controlling them, arching their heads back to glimpse the great expanse above. Whisking granules blew over the brim of the sand-box as the soles of Vova’s sandals thrust into the grit. A rope lie on the ground, he noticed. He looked at the end of the rope and saw several, bellowing kids, stomping around, limping around, like the segments of derailed train or an unfettered centipede. A woman teacher, the caboose, lead them by a jump-rope that ran through the kid’s belt-loops. His mother watched as her Vova furrowed his brows, watched as he got on his knees and followed the trail of the rope, crawling. He was lead to a girl with thin lips, close-together-eyes, and a button-nose, who sat on a sea-saw. Vova tugged on the rope, wishing to free the entire lot of kids who rode the frozen gray animals. “Nuh,” the girl moaned with an under-bite. She touched his ear. He touched her cheek, then looked into her face horrified—so horrified he ran to his mother, who was sitting on the park bench, by the tree, with a blanket that she opened for him to enter like a cocoon.
They were not monsters, but kids, she explained as she rocked him on her lap.
“They’re boys and girls,” asked Vova. He wasn’t sure.
“Yes, they’re just like you,” said his mother, looking down at him.
After a minute of explaining how the boys and girls were just like him, she looked out onto the playground and watched him run to the children, in his red overalls, while noting the profile of his face, as he attempted to play diplomat, or savior.
She thought about how they had fled the political chatter in Minsk.
She thought about how with three hundred dollars and nine suitcases, most of which had food in them, she, Igor, Vova in tow, boarded a train to Austria in the dead of night.
Igor sat across from her, and handed her folded square of a scratchy blanket. Cradling a swaddled Vova in her lap, she glanced at the conveyor belt of velvet-night rush passed the window. She gazed at Igor while hoisting a calf upon the crotch of an opposite knee, leaned down, then started fumbling through a brown, leather sac, then said:
“Do you want me to peel us an orange?”
“All right.” Igor nodded, then said: “And what are we going to do in California?”
“I’m going to be your wife. That’s what.”
“My wife?” Igor grinned. “Now I know you’re crazy.”
Old conversations. Forgotten conversations. Los Angeles, its streets, its Universal Studios, its Fairfax, its Jewish Family Services, was different from the silent snow of Belarus where she left long ago, child in one arm, suitcase in another. Even Igor was uncertain if it was the best place for them to live. She had left the Soviet Union with a child and husband and scurried off due west in pursuit of an idea. They had a choice: to emigrate to Israel or to Los Angeles. Immigrants weighed out their options: a people that didn’t know what a Star of David really symbolized. A Jew? Someone that believed in some kind of mighty God? Was Russian or Hebrew or English their language? There had to be a catch and enough unanswerable questions to make it all a blur. But they exited the train, independent of blurs, banded together, flipped through phrase books that would get them to express what the needed to know: the time, where the bathroom was, where to buy bananas, where to get a script and braces from a doctor to straighten out Vova’s bow-leggedness. “Salvation” wasn’t in a phrase book, but it was in the air. Only “wonder” and “help” came close, that is, if one combined them. Family flesh was all that was easy to comprehend: such idiosyncrasies needed no translation.
She thought all these things while watching Vova on the playground.
The Jewish Federation thought, perhaps, Soviet Jews would choose Jerusalem. They were all wide-eyed immigrants, suspicious of the world around them, even of each other. Leaving Minsk forced them to reconsider what they were. Some of them spoke Yiddish because their parents were Holocaust survivors; some of them were from the Ukraine, some from Moscow, some from Kazakhstan, Leningrad, Gomel, Vitebsk, Odessa—all places where the Nazis and the Red Army had once clashed. Their family opted for New York, then a day later, Los Angeles. They forged their paperwork, made her a Jew, and as Belarussian Jewish refugees were put up in a refugee camp in Lido di Ostia, Italy.
Every weekend they were bussed to Rome.
It was a busy place, that Rome, in 1979. One weekend, perhaps, by happenstance, Pope John Paul II had recently been inaugurated; the cobblestone streets of Vatican City were swarming with tourists and devout Catholics ready to catch a glimpse of him. His shiny Polish face and the sleeves of his robe were flapping in the wind as he made his way down the street in a black town car, maybe several hundred meters from where they were standing—where they sold embroidered napkins and bed linens handed down to as wedding gifts, got rid of mostly children’s toys, matryoshka dolls, spinning tops, and they also sold binoculars, other optical lenses, stop-watches, various pins depicting Stalin and Lenin. The Pope didn’t keep her and Igor’s attention long, however. Vova? She paled. Where was Vovushka? There was Vovushka: running around in a great elliptical path through the cobblestone plaza, running through flocks of pigeons, forcing them to scatter.
She had a difficult time concentrating on the motorcade, a difficult time turning away from him and surrendering to the historical moment: a new Pope—a man that she would never touch or be blessed by, even if she asked for it and pleaded for it and pressed her knees into the ground until they bled for it. No, she stared at Vova.
She couldn’t keep her eyes off of him.
And Vova did not look back at her from the playground. Shrieking children could be heard. She saw him playing, ecstatically, in California, in America, as a new god, far away from bread lines and vodka coupons and the unshakable quotation marks of drunk men, in the Fruzhenski District, who preserved the words of Pushkin. And soon enough, Vova walked up to where she was sitting on the park bench, and asked her if she saw him launching off a swing. “Mama, what’s wrong?” She looked at him. “Nothing,” she said, blankly, as if nothing was in her mind. She looked at the reflection of her bare breasts in the mirror, in the master bedroom, thirteen years later, and at the rumples of her slinky lavender robe. She left the room. I should have said yes, she thought. She descended a staircase. The houses in suburbia were stacked along a green snap-board of landscape like Legos compared to Rome, while eternity, that old babushka, beyond the grave, sat in the corner, knitting, waiting for a pot of water to boil.