Russian Tattoo (30 page)

Instead of asking her what she likes about this tattoo, I let her remark float past my ears as if she had never said it. It glides into the air, just like an old, legendary figure skater we both remember, and then it is gone.

I go back to my laundry, feeling guilty for shutting her out, resenting that she is always here, a constant witness to every moment of my less than perfect, tattooed life.

Forty-Six

M
y driving Mama to doctors becomes our usual outing, our time spent together. Every two months or so we drive to Dr. Klughaupt, her internist; and Dr. Miller, her ophthalmologist; we drive to Dr. Sevano, her cardiologist; and Dr. Stahl, her retina specialist. Every six weeks, we drive to Dr. Phillips, her podiatrist.

Mama likes going to doctors. For fifteen minutes, she is the center of attention, stepping on the scale, rolling up her sleeve for a blood pressure cuff, steadying her chin on the shelf of an eye scanner. After we leave the office, she wants to know what the doctor said about her health. They all say that for her age she is doing fabulously well, but she does not believe me. My legs don't want to walk, she laments. My head spins when I get up, she grumbles. My heart hurts when I wake up at night.

I want to tell her that my heart hurts, too. It hurts to watch her slowly deteriorate: to see her shuffle around the basement in her slippers, holding on to the bed railing; to have to speak to her in short, loud phrases that always sound demanding because she can no longer hear well; to see her tread cautiously across the parking lot, propping herself on a cane. Her face has collapsed in a cascade of wrinkles; her body fat has melted away, making her skin hang off the bones like an ill-fitting suit; her spine has bent, robbing her of a few inches of height.

Is this the reason why I don't go down to the basement as often anymore? She seems so needy—for manifestations of love, perhaps, for more attention from me, for buckwheat with onions I am too busy to cook. I seem to punish her by letting her read and watch TV instead of leafing through our family photo albums together, instead of drinking black currant tea, my grandma's favorite, with her. She has become so humble and quiet in the last few years, yet I don't seem to muster enough generosity to forgive her—for what? For living with me, inadvertently turning me into a spoiled child? For never allowing me to grow up?

I am always one floor above her, close enough to be there in an emergency but distant enough to be able to deny the inevitable a little longer.

We have her cataracts fixed, one eye after the other, and the world opens up to her, she says. She can see the smallest branches on the trees along the parkway as we drive back home, she marvels, able to make out their tiny leaves curling open. She can read the letters on the signs and the numbers of the exits. She can watch Russian movies without the blurry background and the pellicle of gauze over the picture. For the first time in many years, she can read her Russian books without a magnifying glass.

Before we leave the eye surgeon's office, he checks her one more time to see that everything is fine. It is.

“How old is she?” he asks.

“Ninety-six.”

He shakes his head, impressed. “It's good she is still here with you.”

I vigorously nod in agreement. It has only recently occurred to me that she would ever not be here.

Sasha is back home. She has just graduated from the University of Vermont, magna cum laude. Her hair is back to her normal light brown color, and she is now dressed in clothes not exclusively found in the Salvation Army stores. I notice her carefully lined eyes, her emerald-painted nails, her high cheeks touched by rouge. When she moved back from Vermont, she sold her gun. The tops she wears around me are all long-sleeved.

“What's her specialty?” Mama asks. Many decades ago, my mother graduated with a specialty in medicine; later, on my diploma from Leningrad University, my specialty was listed as English philology. Every Russian graduate had a specialty, written in a calligraphic handwriting into the blue passport of a diploma.

“Sociology,” I say. “She is into humanities, just like me.” I don't mention that, as useless in terms of employment as a degree in sociology may be, Sasha has just announced that she wants to try something altogether different, something even less commercial and practical, if this were possible. She wants to try to become a photographer, she has told us, maybe because she took a year of photography at Bard College before she decided that she no longer needed higher education.

I say nothing about photography to my mother because I need time to digest this new development. I need to present the new career prospects calmly, arguing that photography is as lucrative as accounting, as promising and reasonable as teaching. I don't want my mother to get worried about Sasha's future. I don't want her to give me advice on how to change Sasha's mind or on the best way to switch to a more profitable career, something she heard on a commercial watching one of her Russian TV channels. This is how I have communicated with Mama for years: always presenting the summary of the outcomes, never the curves of the process. Always putting her in front of a decision already made, never asking for any input I may have needed earlier.

Is this what Sasha has just done by announcing her photographic aspirations? Does she communicate with me the same way I have been communicating with my own mother? After all, she didn't ask me whether she should try to be a freelance artist in the most unforgiving place, New York; she simply placed me in front of the fact that she was going to do it.

I coax Deema—our terrier, who is already twelve and prefers sleeping to running outside—out of his bed in the kitchen and take him for a walk. He stops and looks around, trying to stall being dragged into the drizzly afternoon, but I pull on the leash toward the street because I need time to think, to have the rain cool my face. I know I am supposed to feel worried about this unforeseen course of events, about the questionable prospect of an introvert breaking into one of the most competitive fields in the world. I am not sure if Sasha has the gift to be a photographer, but I know she doesn't have the technical skills, and it will cost her time and fierce dedication to learn them. My mind tells me I should try to dissuade my daughter from stepping on the risky path she is trying to chart for herself, unless Andy and I are willing to support her for the rest of our lives.

Instead, as Deema and I plod under the drizzle around the block, I feel relieved that Sasha will not have to sit in a cubicle eight hours a day, five days a week, for the next forty years. This is the decision I made when I was twenty-two, after a year of forty-hour weeks behind a secretary's desk. Just as Sasha, I couldn't see my life erased by sameness. And now, by the time my dog and I reach our driveway and escape the rain under the patio roof, I am thrilled, perhaps foolishly and irresponsibly, that every day of my daughter's life, no matter how hard-earned, is going to be a new adventure. By the time I unhook Deema's leash from his collar, I feel proud of her decision to discard all those sociological hypotheses she spent years mastering. I am glad that, of all the possibilities rolled out before her, she has chosen to become an artist.

Knowing how I feel, I am now ready to face my mother. We go downstairs together, Sasha and I. Mama is bent in front of her small refrigerator, taking out vegetables for the daily mountain of salad she chops up. One by one, she slowly and meticulously removes a bag with radishes, half a pepper, quarter of an onion, a long cucumber sheathed in plastic skin.

“Sashenka!” Mama beams when she sees us, and for a moment her eyes almost sink into small waves of skin. She holds out her arms and presses my daughter to her chest. I haven't hugged Mama in a long time, but I can still feel the pillowy softness of her breasts, the visceral sense of comfort that has stayed with me since I got lost in the woods on a mushroom hunt when I was ten. She smelled of kitchen and the woody inside of our armoire then. Later, she smelled of valerian drops and mothballs, of autumn apples and raspberry jam. She smelled of perfume called Red Moscow and of the old leather address book she always carried in her purse. Now she smells of dry skin, the Jergens moisturizer I buy her at the A&P, and the special diabetic herb tea I bring from my Russian trips.

We tell Mama that Sasha has graduated “with excellence,” using the Russian expression for all A's. We tell her about photography.

“Very good,” Mama says, without hesitation. “You will be great at it, Sashenka, if that's what you like.” She has become easygoing, my mother, ready to accept anything from Sasha or me or Marina or Andy because we are the only
ours
left in her life here.

The phone rings upstairs, and I turn to go back into the kitchen. Mama is still holding on to Sasha's wrist, gently making her stay a little longer.

When I hang up on a recorded sales call, I go to the open basement door and listen. I hear Sasha saying something; I hear her beginning to climb the stairs.

I step over to the sink, pretending I wasn't craning my neck by the doorframe, pretending I am busy with the dishes.

“Babusya asks if you could go back down,” Sasha says, emerging from the basement.

“I just came from there. What does she want?”

Sasha regards the basket with fruit, takes an apple, peers at me for a few seconds.

“She wants
you
,” she says, and I know that my daughter sees and understands everything, just as I thought I did when I lived in Leningrad.

Forty-Seven

I
'm living for Yuva and Sima,” Mama often says, referring to her two younger brothers, and this is why I believe in her immortality.

Yuva, the youngest in her family, had been stationed on the border with Poland before the war began, writing only one letter home, a triangle of gray paper my grandma kept on the bottom of a drawer for the rest of her life. “They feed us well here, thick soup and boiled potatoes,” he wrote for her sake. “Yesterday the sergeant said they might soon issue us guns.” Mama could never understand why soldiers on the Polish border, right before the German blitzkrieg into Russia, did not have guns. After the war, the family filed numerous inquiries about Yuva's fate, but until today no one knows exactly what happened to his unarmed battalion stationed to protect the country from invasion.

Mama tells me that, for many years after the war, my grandma ran outside the house at every creak of their front gate to see if it was Yuva returning home. Maybe he had to walk all the way back from Berlin, she reasoned. Or maybe he was wounded and had amnesia, and is now living in another town under a different name, just as she remembered him, a nineteen-year-old boy with blue eyes and unruly copper hair. Until her death in 1968, Grandma refused to believe what Mama had known since the end of the war, that, along with thousands of other youths, Yuva had been plowed into the warm earth in the first hours of the blitzkrieg, when the army of German tanks crossed into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.

Sima, three years younger than Mama, was wounded at the front and made his way back home to Ivanovo in 1942. This is how Mama tells me she remembers that day: It was January, and there was a knock on the door. When Grandma opened the latch, there stood Sima—in a military coat with burnt bullet holes, on crutches, in a torn
ushanka
hat tied under his chin. The hospital could no longer do anything, so they released him. Sima decided not to write home because he wanted to surprise everyone with his arrival. My grandma, wiping under her eyes and making happy sniffling noises, boiled water for him to wash, as Grandpa ordered Sima to take his clothes off immediately—everything down to the rags inside his boots—so he could throw the dirty heap outside, where it was minus twenty degrees Celsius, to save the rest of them from typhus and lice.

Mama says she was furious that a doctor at a front hospital failed to operate properly, leaving a shard of a grenade lodged in her brother's lung. Her voice is low and even now, but there is still a quiet sadness in the rhythm of her words, a regret that her brother hadn't been brought to her own front-line hospital, where she would have removed that last piece of metal from his lung and made him live. That sliver caused a metastatic abscess in his brain, Mama says, and I imagine slow tentacles worming their way from Sima's lung into his head, slithering into his eyes and ears, robbing him of hearing and sight. I imagine Mama sitting by his bed, taking his temperature and peering into his throat, pretending that whatever small medical procedures she performed could make a difference. She kept pretending for Grandma, who still ran outside at every creak of the gate, hoping that Yuva, her youngest son, would walk in, miraculously alive.

Before the war, Sima graduated from the Leningrad Art School, and two of his paintings have made it across the ocean and now hang on the walls of Mama's Ridgewood room. Above her bed is a portrait of my young mother, her lips curled in a happy smile I rarely saw when we lived in Leningrad, the smile that had been wiped off by the war and, later, by the slightly less deadly injuries of Soviet life. Above her table is an oil painting of a soldier throwing a grenade at a tank, the man's uniformed back tense and determined, the tank halted by yellow tongues of flame leaping into the sky.

Every year, Mama reminds me of the day when Sima died, three weeks before my sister's birthday, two months after the birthday of my father. The cemetery was about a kilometer away, where two men with unshaved, veiny faces helped Grandpa lower the coffin into a grave they had dug earlier in the day for a liter of moonshine. Grandma bent down, scooped a handful of wet, heavy dirt, and tossed it into the grave; it hit the lid of the coffin with a thump. My grandfather had to hold her and lead her back since she couldn't see where she was going, tears spilling from her eyes and clouding her glasses. She felt numb, her insides parched and shriveled up, and she leaned on Grandpa's arm, blindly following his lead, wondering why there were any tears left in her at all.

Mama is living for her younger brothers, she says, the two who didn't have a chance to live. Yuva was nineteen when German tanks rolled over the Soviet border. Sima was twenty-four when he died from a wound in his childhood house in 1942. There are a lot of unlived years for my mother to claim.

Mama is lying in bed at Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, hooked to an IV and an oxygen tank. She had grown frail prior to her scheduled departure for New Orleans for an annual three-month winter stay at my sister's. The day before her flight she had difficulty breathing and could barely get out of bed. I was at work on the morning I called Dr. Klughaupt, who told me to call 911.

When I got to the hospital, my mother was just being admitted to the cardio unit. “Congestive heart failure,” said a soft-spoken woman in her thirties, whose badge identified her as Dr. Sharma, a hospitalist. The words
heart failure
sounded so daunting, so distressing. There is a skinny brochure on Mama's blanket, “Living with Heart Failure,” a title that sounds like an oxymoron. I try to find a suitable translation of the term
heart failure
for Mama; in Russian, it turns out, they call it heart deficiency, a more merciful term, with room for a less drastic outcome.

Mama smiles when she sees me, relieved. She looks tiny in the middle of the tangle of tubes, her gnarled fingers over the cover, like a small bird's claws.

“Lenochka,” she says, “I'm so glad you're here.”

She tells me how they brought her to the hospital, how she spent several hours in the ER, speaking to doctors through a translator. She shows me her IV and her oxygen tubes; she points to a special blue phone behind her bed that connects her to a Russian speaker if she needs to ask a question. She is feeling better, she says, with the oxygen and the nitroglycerin patch pasted to her chest.

I sit on her bed and listen, watching the nurse check Mama's meds by the computer screen, helping her out of the bed and into an armchair when a man in a chef's white hat brings dinner at five. I listen and utter short, meaningless sentences as sharp, uncomfortable questions scratch around in my head. How did this all happen, these oxygen tubes and the IV bag slowly emptying into her arm? Did I ignore her complaints about dizziness, her wheezing on the basement stairs, her frequent refrain that her legs refused to walk?

I come back home from the hospital and go down to the basement, where a packed suitcase is still sitting on her bed. Her cup is on the table, filled with chamomile tea, now cold. Her shoes are neatly lined up under the nightstand; they must have taken her to the emergency room in her slippers. I look at the Russian detective mystery she has been reading, bookmarked on her bed next to the portable blood pressure machine. I look at the dozen photo albums—different styles and sizes filled with pictures from her American life—stacked on the shelf; at her last war medal framed on the wall, the one she received from the Russian Consulate in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of victory in World War II.

With Mama not here, her room looks eerie and sad. I go upstairs, dial Sasha in Brooklyn, where she now lives, and tell her Babusya has been taken to the hospital. I want to tell her to come here as soon as possible, but my daughter seems to be able to read my mind. She will be here tomorrow morning, she says, then pauses. “Do you need me to come over tonight?” she asks, and I hear a little girl voice I hadn't heard in years—the voice of a good daughter—the voice my mother should have heard earlier today.

We hire the Ukrainian aide, Sveta, to come to our house three times a week to help Mama with a shower and meals. Quick and efficient, Sveta is done with the chores in an hour, and for the rest of the time they watch Russian television together or lean over family photo albums, with Mama pointing out every relative and every occasion that necessitated a shutter click. I stop by the basement door and listen to their soft banter, to Mama's voice explaining the family connections.

This is what I should be doing, I think: sitting next to her, the two of us looking back on our past.

My home phone rings at eleven at night, and my heart seems to stop when I see my mother's number downstairs.

“I fell,” she whispers into the receiver, her voice almost unrecognizable. I run down the stairs and see her lying on her side, in her blue and white nightgown, stretched between the bathroom and the bed.

I carefully pull her up to her knees; then she helps me seat her on the bed. She doesn't cry out in pain, and I hold on to a little hope that she didn't break any bones. “What happened?” I ask.

“My legs just gave,” she says, “I don't know how. Thank god I was able to reach the phone.”

There is panic in her eyes—something so uncharacteristic of my tenacious, survivor mother—a fear of what would have happened if she couldn't call me.

Her eyes brim with many fears lately: a fear that she won't be able to walk or hear, that the birthday we marked last week will be her last, that her heart will fail her and I won't be there, by her side, to hold her hand.

It is the end of March, my spring break, and Marina comes to stay with Mama while Andy and I take a five-day trip to Chicago. I go over Mama's medications with my sister; I show her how to paste a nitroglycerin patch on Mama's chest.

I say good-bye to Mama. She gets up from the bed and we kiss each other on the cheeks three times, the Russian way. Her eyes are pale blue, smiling: it doesn't happen too often that she has a chance to see both daughters together.

“We'll be back on Tuesday,” I say. “Will see you in a few days.”