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As I grew older, the symbology of our Rodina began to resemble not a fixed ideological landscape but a veritable kaleidoscope of shifting meanings and resonances. By the time I was in third grade and seriously playing around with the various significations of my Young Pioneer tie, I’d made further peace with Soviet split-consciousness. Rather than a debilitating scourge, it seemed like a healthy Mature Socialist mind-set.
You didn’t embrace or reject Power, I’d realized: you engaged and negotiated.
At school I was also busy chasing after the most crucial Mature Socialist commodity: social prestige. I accomplished this by forging my own deep relationship with the mythical zagranitsa. We lived, after all, in a Moscow district swarming with embassy foreigners. Shamelessly I stalked their children. Sheyda from Ankara, my very first target, became my best friend and I enjoyed weekly sleepovers at the Turkish embassy on Bolshaya Nikitskaya Street, the embassy row near my house. I got myself in, too, with Neema and Margaret, daughters of the ambassadors of Ghana and Sierra Leone, respectively. Ghana—what a world superpower! So I thought to myself, slipping past the dour guard and into a private elevator that deposited me right in the Ghanaian ambassador’s sumptuous living room.
My life as diplomatic socialite left me flush with prestigious imported goods. Ballpoint pens, Donald Duck stickers, Smarties, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, and Turkish Mabel gum with a picture of a be-turbaned belle on a shimmery wrapper. Myself, I barely touched this stuff. Instead, in my own modest way I contributed to the massive Brezhnevian shadow economy. I sold, bartered, traded imports for services and favors. For three stale M&M’s, Pavlik, the most glamorous boy at my school, two years my senior, slavishly carried my knapsack for a week. With profits from selling Juicy Fruit in a girls’ bathroom at school, I treated myself to meals at House of Scholars, the elite Academy of Sciences clubhouse, where Mom sent me for dance lessons on Wednesdays. I skipped the silly ballet and made a beeline straight to the extravagantly marbled dining room. Once Mom came to pick me up early and the dance teacher reproachfully motioned her toward the restaurant. There I was, a proper black marketeer, at my regular corner table under a gilded mirror, enjoying a personal cocotte pan of wild mushroom “julie
A romantically mysterious illness, social prestige, a thriving black market career—to say nothing of hopscotch on the ruins of an ideology. This is what my mother proposed to take me away from. But I loved her. And so for her sake I said an insincere Brezhnevian “yes” to her emigration plans.
In May 1974, Mom resigned from her job to avoid compromising her colleagues and handed her emigration papers to an OVIR clerk. The clerk was an anti-Semitic Slav with a luridly ironic surname: Israeleva.
Mom was not optimistic. The big problem was Naum—him and his fancy “intelligence worker” past. “You’ll never be allowed out!” thundered Dedushka, apoplectic at her a
I suppose OVIR was missing some teeth on its fine-toothed comb. In July, Mom and I came back from the polyclinic in the drenching rain to find Dad holding an opened OVIR envelope.
“September,” he blurted out. “They say you’re to leave by September!”
For once, Dad looked shaken. When the rain stopped he took me to an ugly, overlit shishkebab restaurant where a band blasted even at lunch. He told me not to forget him, to write. His unsardonic tone jolted me. Embarrassed by this sudden expression of fatherly sentiment, I silently wrestled with the tough, sinewy meat.
The next two months unfolded as a stagnant slog through red tape. How they tortured us pitiful would-be refugees! Lines to unregister from your “dwelling space,” lines to notarize every legal scrap of your former life. And the money! In a final stroke of extortion and humiliation, the State charged a huge tariff to relinquish Soviet citizenship. All told, emigration expenses amounted to the equivalent of two years’ salary. Mom scraped together the cash by selling art books sent by Marina, her school friend now in New York. This was a loan—she’d pay Marina back later in dollars.
Fra Angelico, Degas, Magritte: they financed our departure. “Imagine, Anyutik!” Mom would exclaim, lugging the high-priced volumes to a dusty secondhand book shop. “Soon—soon we will see the originals!”
The exit-visa process had transformed Mother, I noticed.
Anguished tears, sorrowful regrets—she wasn’t interested. Her vision of departure was not so much a sad, extended farewell as a curt removal; an amputation, surgical and painless, of her forty years as a citizen of our glorious Rodina. Amputation might even be too grand: maybe she regarded her past as a Soviet wart that would simply fall off. Or imagined a quick death by injection and a resurrection in another future and dimension, the unimaginable tam (there) where she’d felt she belonged ever since Lucien of Meknes held her hand during the International Youth Festival. Even I, the cynical black marketeer in the family, couldn’t fathom how a woman so delicate, who unfailingly wept at the exact same passage of War and Peace, and fainted—literally fainted—at my dad’s infidelities could show such resolve in so tragic a circumstance. I don’t think I saw Mother cry once.
This severing of the past included its physical remnants.
The spiteful Brezhnevian Rodina allowed us three suitcases per person. Mom took two tiny ones for the both of us: a semisvelte black vinyl number and a misshapen eyesore resembling a swollen, decaying brick. Studiously she ignored the detailed “to take” lists circulating among Jewish traitors to Rodina. Things for personal use; things to sell while at the transit points of Vie
And generally: “Everything dear to you.”
Our mini-luggage held: one little blanket, two sets of cutlery, two bedding sets, two bowls with pink flowers made in Czechoslovakia, and by way of a “dear object,” one terra-cotta Georgian flower vase of massive ugliness. We owned barely any clothes, and no boots; I had outgrown mine, and Mother’s leaked badly. But she didn’t forget an empty mayo
“Anything dear to you?” Mother asked.
I wasn’t sure.
There was my collection of imported chocolate wrappers that I groomed and smoothed out with my thumb and kept inside Giliarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites. But why bother toting along these capitalist totems when I’d be residing where many, many more could be had? I adored Dedushka Naum’s clanky medals, but he’d never part with them, and neither would customs allow them through.
To my surprise, I thought of my reviled school uniform. Brown, thigh-length, woolen and scratchy, worn under a black pinafore. The dress was dry-cleaned once a year, if at all. But every week, in a domestic ritual replayed across each of our eleven time zones, Soviet moms unstitched the white lace collar and cuffs and sewed on fresh ones. My mother always did this on Monday nights, simultaneously stitching and chattering away on her black telefon. We’d sit in my parents’ room around the low three-legged Fi