25. The Church and the Helicopter


Author and Lenin rekindle their bromance on St. Petersburg’s Moscow Square.

I’M BACK IN RUSSIA. It is June 17, 2011, the temperature is cold and gloomy, but with some outlandish bursts of warmth. In other words the temperature and the way I feel about the country of my birth are one and the same. Since my first return to Russia in 1999, I’ve been back almost every other year, dutifully taking down everything I see, categorizing each kernel of buckwheat and pale sheet of salami, testing myself by walking into the Chesme Church where the maquettes of gallant eighteenth-century Turkish and Russian fighting ships once faced off in their eternal Anatolian battle. I’ve shared vodka shots with weeping policemen in Haymarket Square, slipped on innumerable patches of ice, nearly been sliced in half by a Georgian ruffian; in other words, done all the things one normally associates with a trip to the former Soviet Union.

I am on the morning’s first speedy train between Moscow and St. Petersburg. The train is called the Sapsan, named for the mythical peregrine falcon, the world’s fastest animal, and designed by the equally mythical engineers of Siemens AG. I am hungover to the point where even the gentle German rocking of the Falcon brings on serious flashes of nausea. In the past few years I’ve been careful about my drinking. But on the night before my current Moscow-Petersburg journey, spurred on by that most lubricated of creatures, an aging Russian intellectual, I drank myself to the point where I wedged myself into the cupboard of a Moscow bar. I remember a pleasant young American television executive working on some suspicious-sounding international project telling me, “Wow, you really do drink like a Russian.”

Afterward, blankness, the flash of a hipster hotel on a trendy island off-shore from the Kremlin, a hundred-dollar last-minute cab to the train station, and here I am in the biznes-class carriage of the Falcon, a thirty-eight-year-old man about to start writing his first memoir. Which is what brings me to St. Petersburg in 2011. Even as I am inching my way between Russia’s two biggest cities, my parents are charting their path across the Atlantic. My mother has not been to Russia in twenty-four years, since her mother died, and my father in thirty-two years, or from the time he left the Soviet Union in 1979.

We are all coming home.

Together.

A wind whips the Falcon into the station. It is early summer, but the St. Petersburg skies are gray, that unremitting gray of upstate New York in winter. The days are almost at their longest, the light is flat and cruel; soon, there will be no real sunset. At night, by moonlight, the sea wind sends the Finnish clouds on secret missions over the city.

I’ve booked two sleek hotel rooms across from the train station near Uprising Square for me and for my parents, but when I show up, tired and haggard from my insomniac trip to Moscow (its purpose: an article about a Muscovite magazine called Snob), I am told my room isn’t ready. To my exhaustion is added a strand of fear. What if I don’t get any sleep before my parents arrive? They have come at my request, have traveled to a country they don’t particularly want to remember. Over the years I’m the one who’s returned so many times, have penned so many nightmarish scenarios about the place, and now I’m the one who has to protect them. But from what? From memory? From skinheads? From the treacherous wind? All I know is that I need to be my best for them. My mother is in her mid-sixties and my father in his early seventies. By Russian standards, they are already advanced pensioners. Finally given the room key, I plop down on all that cheap blond wood, large TV flashing images of all the other properties owned by the hotel chain, which, par for the global course, is based in Minneapolis but administered out of Brussels. Two tidy Ativan tablets touch the tip of my tongue, and the usual ragged, unsatisfying, chemical sleep approaches.

The terrible marimba of the phone alarm. The fumbling for the toothbrush. The elevator descends with me partly in it. And then they are standing there before me in the busy lobby, two skinny people hemmed in by fat provincial tourists representing several countries. “Hey!” I shout, ready for an embrace.

“Little son!” my mother shouts. And I am smaller.

“Little one,” my father says. And I am smaller still.

“Welcome,” I say, for some reason, in English. And then in Russian: “Are you tired?” And as soon as the first words of Russian—Vy ustali? — get an exit visa out of my mouth I recoil from myself, shocked by hearing my own goofy adolescent bass around my parents. Granted, with my ever-growing American accent, I do not sound entirely native when I govoryu po-russki with cabdrivers, hotel clerks, or even my good Petersburg friends. But right now I sound like a child just getting his mouth around his first Russian words. Or is it because I’m trying to speak to my parents with grown-up authority? Trying, against all reason, to be their equal?

How much time have I spent in the last twelve years running up and down this exhausted, melancholy city, retracing their steps, trying to somehow make them my own. And then with the first Russian words out of my mouth, I realize the truth of the matter. It’s not possible to make their lives my own. While my mother and father are here, this is their country. And so my responsibilities lighten. And so I realize that what I have to do for the next week is to ignore my own goofy Russian bass and, simply, to listen.

To the Minnesota tidiness of their room, my mother has added her own tidiness, a system of packing of infinite complexity, so that most of the contents of their three-story house have been condensed and magically transported to the old homeland. Plastic bags beget plastic bags, there are umbrellas, rain jackets, hoods, money pouches, and, from tomorrow’s breakfast table, yogurts, heavy bottles of water, a range of fortifying snacks. She will leave the hotel as provisioned as an astronaut testing the first reaches of an inhospitable planet. In her bones, this may still be her country. But she will not touch it with her hands the way I do, trying to lyricize the filth and the decay.

My mother is in her suburban gray sweatpants, bustling around the hotel room, hours of preparation still ahead of her before we head out to dinner. My father sports his STRIPED BASS CONSERVATION PARTICIPANT cap, a new Banana Republic jacket, and swish sunglasses, looking surprisingly Western by way of eastern Queens. Only the combination of black socks and leather sandals betrays him as a true native of this land.

Their strength amazes me. After two flights totaling fifteen hours, after lugging their considerable luggage across half the city via buses and metro — they will not spend the money for a taxi from the airport — they are still alert and vital, ready to down 250 grams of vodka at the Metropol restaurant down Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main axis. This is the superhumanity of the immigrant, but woe be to the all-too-human offspring living in the shadow of such strength. Woe be to the sensitive one who requires one milligram of a benzodiazepine just to fall asleep after a journey of a few hundred kilometers taken aboard a peregrine falcon, versus the many thousands they have traveled aboard British Airways’ economy class.

“Igor, you look good,” my mother says. “Not like you’re tired.”

“I wouldn’t say so,” my father quickly intervenes, the fur sticking out of his shirt in the approaching twilight. For the longest time, he would wear my clothes, my hand-me-ups from Stuyvesant, all those peacock Union Bay and Generra shirts, so small and weak on his muscular body. “There are terrible circles under his eyes,” my father says, beholding me fully. “And what do you have on your forehead? Those two lines?”

They are called wrinkles, I want to say, but I do not want to appear mortal in front of him. “I leaned against the seat in front of me on the train,” I lie.

Throughout this trip, I will capture little instances of my family reflected in shop windows, my parents looking younger than their ages, younger than many of the people around them, while I look at least two decades beyond my years, the dead graying hair, the sunken eyes, and all the imprints from the years of hard living, those two telltale lines cracked into my forehead. How did it happen that I have aged in tandem with the citizens of St. Petersburg, the city in which my parents had reached their own middle age, while they have seemingly reversed time like true Americans?

My greatest fear: dying before they do. Growing up, it had been the reverse. I couldn’t understand how to be on this earth without them. But now every time I board a plane for some ragged destination, I feel their fear ascend through the air alongside me, the “autistic” vaccinations coursing through my blood.

“I will wash quickly under the armpits,” my father says, while my mother continues her endless grooming, warning us that “a woman is a long song.”

Settling in with his clean armpits, my father, the long journey behind him, begins to talk amiably, almost contentedly, about coming “home”: “You know, little son, you could write an entire book about me. I’m not an extraordinary person, but because my life was so varied, all my studies, and jobs in different places, there was much that was interesting.

“You understand, little son, that just like you, I’m a lonely [odinokii] person by nature. I don’t want to say that I like loneliness. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t.”

Maybe this is the time for me to say, I love you. Or, better still, I am you. Maybe this is the flip side of the silence I have mastered. The inability to say what needs to be said until it is too late.

My mother sticks her head out of the bathroom. “Hey, guys!” she says happily. “I was so unattractive. But now I feel refreshed!”

We are heading up Nevsky Prospekt. The broad Nevsky cuts across the center of St. Petersburg at a northwestern tangent, as if trying to lead the way to Scandinavia. In the times of Gogol and Pushkin most everything happened along this street, from commerce to love to café-scribbled poetry to the choosing of seconds for duels. Today, it is still the place for a long aimless walk from the low-rent Uprising Square to the city’s focal point, Palace Square, where the de-tsared Winter Palace sits on its haunches in a green provincial funk. On Nevsky, chicken is fried in the Kentucky manner, and stores like H&M and Zara will, if given the chance, clothe a newly middle-class person from the shapka on her head to her galoshes.

St. Petersburg is a sad place. Its sadness lies in a mass grave in its northeastern suburbs along with the 750,000 citizens who died of hunger and German shelling during the 871-day siege, which began in 1941. Petersburg never truly recovered. It is impossible to walk down Nevsky, alone or with my parents, and not feel the oppression of history, the weight on our own family and on every family that has lived within this city’s borders since 1941. CITIZENS! a preserved sign at the northern mouth of Nevsky declares, DURING ARTILLERY BOMBARDMENT THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS THE MOST DANGEROUS. And so it is.

We are strolling past outdoor patios heaped with sushi and sunlight. Women are already dressed for June’s gentle heat, looking as reproductive as their counterparts in New Jersey, only distinguished by the Orthodox crosses on their lovely bare necks. Indians with cameras press around us, preserving every cornice and portico for their prodigious zip files.

“This city always bring on sadness,” my mother says. “All of us children were sad growing up. There was a lot of dreaming.”

“On Rubenstein Street, I had my first love,” my father says. “Right over there.”

Much as I mercifully lack writer’s block, my mother has never been at a loss for a stray conversational tangent. “Before we left for America,” she says to me, “I went to the Eliseev store to buy you chicken cutlets. There was nothing to eat. So I was told to go to the Store of Children’s Nutrition. I spent two hours standing in line there, and right under my nose, they ran out of cutlets. I came home and I had nothing to feed you.”

I try to think of the time when I went without chicken cutlets. But all I see is my grandmother Galya, the one we left behind to die in Russia, dutifully feeding me cheese as I work away on Lenin and His Magical Goose, her meaty beak bent over my efforts.

“The Coliseum Movie House,” my mother announces. “This was the first time I saw Sophia Loren! The line was around the block. I also saw Divorce, Italian Style. Stefania Sandrelli was playing in it, so there were only these little fold-out seats left. I fell out of my seat from laughing. Can you believe it? That’s how hard I was laughing. Marcello Mastroianni and all that. I was sixteen. Can you imagine that? Almost fifty years ago.”

“When we get to Liteiny Street, we’ll have a big talk,” my father says.

I have never been a fan of “big talks.”

We are approaching Liteiny Street.

“Little son, let’s go for a moment just down this block. It’s a moment of great sadness.”

My father seems quite intent on leading me past a pretty young woman smelling a daisy. We are approaching the portico of the cream-colored two-hundred-year-old Mariinskaya Municipal Hospital, one of the city’s largest.

“I spent time here,” my father says. “In the nervnoye otdeleniye.”

I run the Russian through my mind. The sky is pressing down on us with a heavy gray lid. The Nervous Department? What exactly is he trying to say? My father was a mental patient? For the first time on this trip, I feel danger. A traveler’s danger. Like when I took the wrong taxi in Bogotá a year ago, speeding away from my hotel instead of toward it.

“How old were you?” my mother asks.

“Let’s see. My mother was …” He has to think of her age first, before he can determine his own. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “So I was twenty-three,” he concludes.

The information hovers in front of me, still in the form of a question. My father was a twenty-three-year-old mental patient? I finger the calming Ativan pill, the lone resident of my jeans pocket. The taxi is still hurtling toward the Colombian jungles, toward the band of rebels who will hold me hostage for decades.

“So young,” my mother says.

“I was in the crazy ward,” my father says. “And they thought I would remain a durak [idiot] forever.”

“This street leads to Pestelya Street, where my friend lived,” my mother says, apropos of nothing.

“And so, little son,” my father interrupts her, “it’s a long story. I was in the hospital, they performed terrible experiments on me, and I almost died.”

I make an affirming noise. Uhum.

“They made me drink buckets of valerian root, bromine, so that I wouldn’t have any male desires.”

Oho, I say. I cannot even begin to imagine what he’s saying.

Uzhas,” my mother says. Horror.

“And there were real crazy people in there. There was one old guy he would shit himself every week and smear the shit on the wall.”

“The Tsar’s Pierogi!” my mother reads a passing sign with interest.

“And he’d scream, ‘Down with Lenin and Stalin!’ ” My mother laughs. “They’d pacify him and then in a week he’d be back at it. We had quiet crazy people, too. I was the quietest.” My mother laughs with her head thrown back. “But I could have been loud. After this they gave me a spravka [certificate] attesting to my stay, and they wouldn’t take me in the army.”

“But what brought this on?” my mother asks.

“I was sitting at home, reading a book, and then my mother found me on the floor, foaming at the mouth, convulsions, like an epileptic. That was the first and last time.”

Ativan in my mouth, I ask the next question: “What was the diagnosis?”

“Soldering of the vessels in the brain.” As soon as he says it, I think what my psychoanalyst back in Manhattan will soon affirm. The Soviet diagnosis is complete nonsense.

“When your father proposed to me,” my mother says, “he said, ‘I have a certificate. I have a mental illness.’ And I thought: What a typical Jewish trick. He’s completely healthy. He just doesn’t want to serve in the army. But it turned out it was the truth.

“We’re so stupid when we’re young. Someone tells you they’re mentally ill, why would you marry him? But I thought, He’s such a smart, serious person. It can’t be. I would notice if he were psychotic. But sometimes, especially as he’s aged, you can see that he really is mentally ill.” My mother laughs. The simple trill of her laugh has not declined over the years; if anything it’s been buffeted by her endless sorrows and disappointments.

By his early twenties my father has failed his exams and has been kicked out of Leningrad’s Polytechnic Institute. “My mother used to nag me,” he says. “ ‘What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?’ ”

“Just like I used to do to you,” my mother says to me, laughing some more. She switches to English: “Failure! Failure! Failure!”

My father’s eyes dart around his fabulous sunglasses, his teeth are relatively straight and white for this part of the world, his beard is white flecked with gray, as mine is already flecking at an accelerated pace. As an old friend of his had just said to me: “You are an exact copy of your father. You have nothing of your mother’s.” Which is not entirely true. My father has been adjudged more handsome than I. But if the poem I wrote in college, “My Reflection,” can be believed, we are almost brothers. Our brain scans would probably attest to that as well. The Ativan is melting under my tongue, entering the bloodstream.

Later my father will tell me about another “treatment” he received at the hospital. They puncture his spine with a needle and blast oxygen into it, trying to “unsolder” the blood vessels of his brain. He comes out a wreck, scared of taking the tram, afraid of leaving his room. The middle half of his twenties are a wasteland of depression and anxiety. It is impossible to know what led him to foam at the mouth and convulse in the first place, but my psychoanalyst believes a neurological episode, a grand mal seizure, for example, may have been the cause. Treatments for neurological disorders generally do not include placement in a clinic where psychopaths smear their feces along the wall, injection of oxygen into the spine, and the administration of bromine to fight a young man’s erections.

I part ways with my parents for the evening. I meet my good friend K in the southern suburb in which he lives. We share a spicy kebab at an Armenian joint. We tell jokes about a certain horse-faced leader in the Kremlin, and I drink as much vodka as I can. He has work tomorrow, but as we embrace and he puts me on a tram back to Uprising Square, I don’t want to leave him. Drunkenly, I watch the city assemble itself outside my tram window, the Soviet giving way to the baroque.

My father was a mental patient.

So now I forgive him?

But it was never about forgiveness. It is about understanding. The whole psychoanalytic exercise is about understanding.

What did he say when I told him years ago I was seeing a psychiatrist? “It would have been better if you had told me you were a homosexual.”

But he knows, doesn’t he?

He knows what it’s like not to have control over yourself. To see the world pass right through your hands.

Is he trying to settle up with me?

I wander into the new Galeria mall, a behemoth by Uprising Square, filled with Polo and Gap stores, and all the other purveyors of the Hebrew school clothing I never owned. It’s sad to reach out to past hurts and find nothing there. Just the splash of my sneakers against the cold Galeria marble, the echoes of my footsteps, because at this late hour on a weekday I am practically alone.

In my hotel room, with my parents just a floor above me, I put my head to my pillow and think of my wife. I think of the warmth of her. I think of the relative silence of her own immigrant family, the silence that I crave. My wife. Even though I am “the writer,” she reads more than I do. She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.

I think of my mother and father. Of their constant anxiety. But their anxiety means they still want to live. A year shy of forty, I feel my life entering its second half. I feel my life folding up. I sense the start of that great long leave-taking. I think of myself on the subway platform at Union Square. I am invisible, just a short obstacle others have to get around. Sometimes I wonder: Am I already gone? And then I think of my wife and I feel the whoosh of the number 6 train, the presence of others, the life still within me.

Why did he tell me this today?

The Admiralty building on the banks of the Neva River, headquarters of the Russian navy, has been built in the same loud Empire style as the hospital where my father spent part of his life. The Admiralty, a kind of early-nineteenth-century skyscraper, is topped by a gilded spire itself topped by a small sail warship, which appears regularly on local souvenirs and whose platonic shape delighted me as a child, a golden addendum to the warships in the Chesme Church. To the southwest of the Admiralty building lies the vast central Admiral-teiskii Rayon, a district of initial grandeur and increasing shabbiness. This is where my mother hails from.

My mother studied and later taught piano. I believe the reverence of music she shared with my opera-obsessed father allowed these two dissimilar people to fall in love. The story of my mother’s introduction to music is slightly different from the story of my first encounter with words at the behest of her mother, Grandmother Galya.

“When I was five,” my mother says as we exchange the colonnaded riverbanks and canals for the shawarma-reeking depths of her neighborhood, “my father bought me a balalaika that cost forty rubles. This was the last money we had and it was supposed to be used for food. My mother [Grandmother Galya] took the balalaika and smashed it against the wall of our apartment. I started to cry. My mother comforted me by saying, ‘I know you’re crying not because I smashed the balalaika but because you can see how upset I am. You’re very sensitive.’ ”

My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?

I think back to the Kiev-style cutlet she sold me when I had graduated from Oberlin. I see mother’s laughing face as she puts the twenty-dollar bill she’s inveigled out of me in the pocket of her pink pullover. She is happy. Haggling with her son is fun, especially since he always loses. At money matters he is also a failure. And she is laughing because she can feel that part of this must be a joke. She understands the absurdity of the moment. She will often begin an anecdote with the words “Guys, you want to laugh?” And then she will laugh herself as if to demonstrate what it’s all about.

She is laughing. But is she sad? Is part of her sad? What is it like to be her at the moment she takes my money? What does it feel like to sell your broke son a horrible piece of chicken at retail? How many years must pass before I feel sad for her? Is this the moment? Is this why I brought them back here?

The balalaika smashes against the wall. The five-year-old girl begins to cry. And then, here in the present, the sound of a violin fills the street. We are approaching the college where the post-smashed-balalaika phase of my mother’s musical education took place. My mother poses for the camera mock-solemnly and gives it a four-finger pioneer’s salute. In the lobby a plaque commemorates alumni lost in the Second World War. NO ONE IS FORGOTTEN, it says. Next to the plaque are the usual bearded luminaries of the nineteenth century and next to the luminaries stands a new ATM machine. An incredibly Russian-looking boy with several layers of disheveled blond hair and a perfect potato nose is hitting the accordion pretty hard.

I can see the immediate disappointment on my mother’s face, the sadness of return, the letdown of memory. “Everything used to shine around here,” she says. “Now everything looks so unkempt.”

“There’s a fine stink here,” my father says, screwing up his Americanized nose at the produce of so many armpits.

“The first time I came in here, I heard a girl playing the piano,” my mother says. “I nearly dropped. I said to my father, ‘I want to study here! I will study here.’ And I was accepted. No one expected that of me. Stalin spent a lot of money on this stuff. He loved music.”

We trudge out of the music school and toward the distant Pryazhka River. “Why are all the windows boarded up?” my mother asks, as we approach the house where she grew up. SALE, a sign says in English. APARTMENTS, 228 METERS. “Look, they’ve set everything on fire!” Indeed, one of the windows has been blown out, the surrounding frame charred black.

My mother looks around the building’s ruined courtyard uncertainly. “Petya Zabaklitski from our class, he lived in that entryway over there, every day he would run ahead and wait for me. And whenever I walked home he would shout, ‘Yasnitskaya [my mother’s maiden name] the Jewess is coming. Yasnitskaya the Jewess is coming!’ This was the first sorrow of my life.”

My father grew up in the village of Olgino, northwest of the city center in the so-called resort area of Petersburg, which hugs the northern banks of the Gulf of Finland. Several redbrick mafioso-style estates, their boundary walls sprinkled with security cameras, have appeared along its rutted streets, but Olgino still feels like a half-wrecked semi-rural neighborhood moored in some failing periphery. We could be in Michigan or Sicily or North Africa or Pakistan. Only the weather betrays our latitude.

Today is cold and rainy, but the village is swaddled in the unkempt greenery which my father is clearly delighted to see. We are approaching a ramshackle green house built in some indeterminate Soviet style of rural housing, New England barn meets Russian izba meets instant decay.

“Here would pass a herd of cows,” he says. “In the morning I would have to push out our cow, Rosa, so that she would go into the forest with the other cows. There was a shepherd with a cattle prod. Oy, my heart is starting to jump!”

There is laughter coming out from under his baseball cap. The snow-white goatee is mirthful. He speaks without pause. “Our house was one of the biggest houses, fifteen-twenty families lived in it. Here there were little garden plots.” We walk by a vast rotting woodpile. “Here was our veranda.” We walk by boarded-up windows. “Here we planted flowers.” A collapsing brick shack sheltering an old Suzuki four-by-four. “Here Aunt Sonya had a little barn, sheep, pigs, cows. We had a good warm barn, you could keep a cow or a piglet there in winter. Here was the outhouse. Always tons of shit there. Frozen shit in the winter. Here lived a girl named Gelya, when boys my age or older would see her we’d always shout ‘Gelya, opa! Gelya, opa!’ And she would laugh.” He makes a humping motion at the invisible Gelya.

“Be careful, there are stray dogs here,” my mother says.

We pass by an old Soviet radio jamming tower. “After I was released from the hospital,” my father says, “I was still half-crazy. My heart kept trembling. My mother and I rented a room here in the summer. I lived here from May to November, and I was mostly alone. Every day I’d go to the gulf,” the nearby Gulf of Finland, “swimming morning and night, even when there was ice. This saved me. This made me a human being again, as opposed to an invalid.”

My father traces his weak nerves back to his life with Ilya, or Ilyusha in the diminutive, his cruel, erratic, alcoholic stepfather, whom my father eventually overpowered. “We lived in a room a hundred sixty square feet,” my father says. “Ilya was capable of anything.”

“And you fought with him?” I ask.

Proudly: “I beat him! Until he bled! Until he bled!

My mother laughs. “A good little son you were.”

“My mother would come home and she would find out. We’d be silent, but there would be traces of blood on the curtains and elsewhere. My mother, of course, loved me more than him.”

We are passing a line of birches, so clean and bright in the miserable weather. My father introduces a new subject. “Why am I so strong [krepkii], even to this day? Because from seven to five I worked hard. And I also played sports. Skis, skates, running, swimming. If you do farm work, you don’t even need to exercise.

“I learned to love the peasant’s work. Jews weren’t supposed to do that. And in tsarist Russia Jews weren’t even given land, because they were supposed to be lazy and good for nothing.

“I still have very good memories of Olgino. Because I am basically a country person. I like reading and music and all that. But I don’t like big cities. Not Manhattan, not Leningrad. To go to the opera, the museum, fine. But I like to be surrounded by trees, forest, grass, fresh air, fishing, and sunshine.”

We walk toward the gulf which restored his sanity.

We find ourselves back on Nevsky Prospekt, approaching the sienna-colored tower of the old city duma, or assembly. This is where first dates in Petersburg often begin, and my parents were no different. They met on the steps beneath the Italianate tower, where today, dozens of teenaged and twenty-something boys and girls are huffing away at cigarettes, tapping away on their phones. “When we first met I couldn’t understand what she was,” my father says. “It was as if some kind of orange had walked up to me.”

“I painted my cheeks with orange powder,” my mother explains. “My friend had a boyfriend who knew how to get anything. And so for New Year’s he got everyone Polish powder, which was orange. But we were all very proud of it. All of Leningrad was orange. Anything Polish was a big deal. Such pretty packaging.”

“So,” my father continues, “I was standing there and I saw this orange person. And I thought this is not one of ours! It must be a foreigner. She was more yellow than a Chinese.”

“I’m telling you it was the Polish powder!”

“I was wearing a hat that looked like—”

“A pierogi.”

“That looked like a pierogi. It was called a khrushchyovka. Gray and made of sheep. And I was also wearing a handsome French coat.”

Very handsome,” my mother says, and I breathe in that sentence deeply. My parents still love each other.

On our way back to the hotel, they mention that there is only eighteen thousand dollars left on the mortgage of their Little Neck home and that they will pay this sum off within months. “Now we will be free!” my father says.

Now they will be free.

We are crossing Moscow Square.

They’ve put in gaudy fountains next to the pine trees where my father and I would play hide-and-seek. Beneath my Lenin there’s a temporary summer stage from which issues horrible thumping Russian pop, something about sun rays and “Get closer / closer to my heart.” There are Nike swooshes where the old gastronom used to be. Children who have no knowledge of the Great Leader scamper on and off Lenin’s podium, singing “la la la la la.” A lone boy in camouflage pants is texting with his mouth open. A man is holding a woman’s ass by the fountains, his bare shorts-clad legs wrapped around her. This is my sacred space, Moscow Square, June 2011.

We are approaching the building where we lived; beyond it, the Chesme Church. I am breathing hard. I have to pee. My father is telling me how Franklin D. Roosevelt ruined America.

We walk into the peeling entry way of our apartment house. The building is painted in the unappetizing colors of rose and dun, festooned with great loops of graffiti. Runty-looking kids are sitting by some ad hoc storage containers. The grass is overgrown with weeds and daisies.

“Where was the rocket?” I ask, curious about the rusty spaceship where I used to play Cosmonaut.

“The rocket was over there,” my father says, pointing at a standard-issue multicolored playground with swings and slides. A touch of sunlight, but no more, falls upon the courtyard where I used to spend my healthy days. The scraggly trees take what they can get.

“I always had nightmares about a big black steam pipe,” I say.

“That pipe, little son, was somewhere near here.”

“What were you afraid of?” my mother asks. “What did you imagine? You were afraid of tree roots when you were three.”

“Freud could have said a lot about all this,” I say, forgetting my audience. “He might have said it was about sexuality. The child growing up, afraid of becoming …” My mother grimaces. I stop talking.

Our former lives hang above us. Beige brick, casement windows, the occasional wooden or iron balcony, exposed gray piping, black electrical wires.

“It was big and dark,” my father says of the pipe.

“Like a rocket,” I say. “I always thought there was going to be an explosion. And we’d all be flung into the cosmos.”

“No kidding,” my mother says. “How could you even have imagined that?”

We return to the street, the facades of our megablock forming a pinkish wave flanked by a column of oaks.

“And over there, to the left, there was a church,” my father says.

The sidewalks have piled against each other like so many adolescent teeth. An unreformed ancient tram passes with a nineteenth-century European clatter. My mother is limping on the way to the church. My father jokes that she’s drunk too much beer at Little Jap (Yaponchik), the Moscow Square sushi joint with the casually racist name where we just ate lunch.

“I didn’t drink too much,” my mother protests, “I didn’t eat too much. I have a corn on my foot.”

“Can’t bring the old lady with us,” my father says. “We should have left her home.” I laugh, a braying sound. This is how they talk. This is how I never learned to talk. Not in Russian. Not in English. The supposedly funny banter with a twist of the knife. That’s what I have my novels for.

My father squeezes her with love. “Starukha [old lady],” he says, “let’s take her by the arms and legs and throw her in the garbage dump.”

“I’m not drunk. I drank half what you drank.”

“You drank all the beer.”

All of this is said in good humor and could go on for the rest of the afternoon. But it stops.

We are standing in front of it. The sky is the same dour gray as every other day, while it is the same pastry pink they serve at my mother’s favorite Café North on Nevsky. “What a pretty church,” I say. “This used to be the museum of … the naval fleet, something like that?”

“Yes, because it was the battle of Chesme,” my father says.

“I don’t remember anything!” says my mother.

Its three spires are poking into the northern murk, there’s a sandy lot in front of it. A drunk is sitting on a bench with his arms around one leg. My mother sits down on another bench to treat her corn. “Just go in the church by yourselves,” she says. “If there’s a toilet, tell me.”

“Do you remember we used to launch your helicopter here?” my father says.

“The helicopter, yes.”

“Many, many times we launched the helicopter. You liked it so much. And I did, too. I actually liked it, too.”

“Where did we find the helicopter?”

“We bought it! Where did we find it? It flew so high, almost to the windows.”

“I remember it got stuck one time.”

“No, I don’t remember that. I don’t think so. Many, many times we would launch it. You were so happy.”

We come upon a heavy wooden door. My father takes off his cap. Inside the church, a floodlit study in pink and gold. People are crossing themselves with a quiet vengeance. “They sure knew how to build churches in Russia,” my father says, impressed. “The most well known of the post-Byzantine style is the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod. I was there.”

We leave the church. And I think: That was it? That was the entire visit? That was the sum of fifteen years’ worth of panic attacks?

My mother is still sitting next to a dirty flowerpot outside the church, carefully applying Dr. Scholl’s to her feet. “You’re a comical old lady,” my father says to her. She gets up and begins to waddle, penguin-like, away from the church and back toward Moscow Square and the metro that will take us back to our hotel. We pass by a graffito that addresses the three of us Jews specifically: “The Slavic Realm is for Slavs only!”

“His posture has improved so much,” my mother says of me. “He’s unrecognizable. His walk. It’s like he’s not my son!”

“He’s been going to the gym,” my father says. “Feel his arms. How I fought with him to get him to play sports, but he didn’t do dick.”

“You didn’t want to,” my mother says to me. “He tried playing ball with you. He built you a little ladder.” As I write this, I hold a photo of myself climbing my father’s makeshift wooden ladder in our Leningrad apartment, wearing a sailor’s outfit and a shit-eating grin. The photo is dated 11/1978, and my mother’s handwriting on the back announces: “The famous athlete training at home.”

“He was trying to stop you from being afraid of heights,” my mother says. “And it worked, you climbed it.”

“Yes, you climbed to the top,” my father says. “Gradually. At first you climbed two or three steps, and then you got to the top. It’s all about training yourself.”

“On the one hand, your father taught you well,” my mother says. “On the other hand, he always pushed you.”

“Pushed me?”

“He wanted you to overcome your fear of heights but then when you got to the top he tried to push you off. And I read in Freud that you should never do such a thing.” She read in Freud? “It just creates more fear. But your father didn’t understand that. He was young himself. Thirty-three years old, what did he understand? Come to think of it, he was maybe about thirty-six when he pushed you off the ladder.*

“He pushed you from the heights, like this!” my mother says, as she makes a pushing motion. She laughs. “He scared you, and you became even more fearful of heights.”

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” my father says. “I have something to show you!”

We’re walking by Lensovet (Leningrad Soviet) Street. There are cheap lace curtains in the windows of the apartment blocks. The hotel Mir, which I’ve once unfairly described as “the worst hotel in the world,” sits on one side of the street. We step over crooked tram lines and unkempt vegetation. A soot-covered truck passes by. My father begins to speak rapidly, as if he has been building up the courage to do so.

“As I was telling you, little son, one day when we were walking down this street after launching our helicopter by the church, we were going back to our house and you started to behave rascally [ty nachal shalit’]. You were still trying to launch the helicopter on the street and there were so many people around. I told you once, twice, you didn’t listen, then I swung my fist and you got it in the nose. And the blood began to flow.”

My mother laughs. “Oy, how could you do that? I gave my son into your hands, and you would do that!”

“When I came back to Russia as an adult and walked by here I began to feel very scared,” I say. “And I had dreams about helicopters.”

“Really?” my father says. A sad-looking child peeks out from behind his lace curtains as we walk by a first-floor apartment. We pass a sign for a cell phone company: SIGN UP AND COMMUNICATE FOR FREE.

“And then I bought a book about Petersburg. I was looking at it in the store, and I saw the Chesme Church, and I had a panic attack.”

“Oh, Igor, you are so sensitive,” my mother says. “And that is why you are a writer.”

“In Russia you could do things like that,” I say, meaning punch a five-year-old child in the nose until he bled. “But in America …”

“You couldn’t do that in America?” my mother asks.

“I didn’t want to beat you,” my father says. He looks thoughtful. “It was by accident. I waved my hand and hit you in the nose.”

“I only really beat you up once,” my mother says, “and I was so sad afterward.

“I guess even from the start I was an American mama,” she says.

It is time for me to be silent. It is time for me to listen, not to talk. But it is also time for me to go underground.

It is 2010, a year before this current trip with my parents. I have returned to St. Petersburg to do a reading tour on behalf of the U.S. State Department. With some free time on my hands, I am taking the metro to the southern suburb to see my friend K. The Petersburg metro, built under Stalin, is the most reliable mode of transport in the city, but on that day, just as we are approaching Moscow Square, the train stalls.

I look up at a poster showing a pretty girl of about five holding a paintbrush with white paint smudged on her cheeks and forehead, smiling mischievously. The caption reads:

WHAT WOULD A RESPONSIBLE PARENT DO?

a) Put her in the corner

b) Enroll her in art school

c) Suggest that you paint together

— Russia Without Cruelty to Children!

The panic attack begins immediately. My breath is gone. I look up at the grimy ceiling of the metro car, trying to see right through it to my freedom, but all I can see through the deep tunnel and the Soviet wiring is Moscow Square and Lenin and the Chesme Church and something I cannot articulate.

An organization called Russia Without Cruelty to Children! is suggesting that the worst Russian parents are capable of is placing their playful, paint-splattered children in the corner. What I wouldn’t have given for that corner, that mythical, bloodless corner.

But right now, there is no place to sit on the crowded train. No corner for me to hide in. The train is not moving. Maybe it will never move! Maybe I will be stuck here with this paint-splattered, smiling girl forever. I turn to my fellow standing passengers, each of them rendered faceless by my panic attack, and begin to formulate what to say in Russian. “Gospozha,” I would start, to the most matronly and kindest of the faceless bunch. “Missis. I need to get off this train immediately. Please summon the conductor.”

But I know I can’t say it. I know this is no longer my city and these are not my people. But is it still my language? I close my eyes and begin to remember the words of my father’s letters.

Good day, dear little son.

A trickle of breath.

How are you doing? What are you doing? Are you going to climb the “Bear” Mountain and how many gloves have you found in the sea? Have you learned to swim yet and if so are you planning to swim away to Turkey?

More breathing, shallow, but familiar. I whisper the words to myself, the way I used to whisper to myself in Russian in the first grade of Hebrew school, the American children thinking me a lunatic.

One day in Gurzuf, a submarine named Arzum sailed in from Turkey. Two commandos wearing Aqua-Lungs departed the boat and swam for the shore. Unbeknownst to our border guards they headed for the mountain, for the forest. In the morning the Soviet border guards saw fresh trails on the beach of the “Pushkin” sanatorium and called on the border guard, who summoned their search dog. She quickly found the two hidden Aqua-Lungs under the rocks. It was clear — an enemy. “Search!” the border guards commanded the dog, and she immediately ran in the direction of the International Pioneers Camp. Story to be continued — at home.

The loud but happy turn of the wheels beneath us. We are moving again! We are coming into the station, we are coming into Moscow Square. I unclench my worried fists, open my eyes, and stare into the angelic face of the five-year-old girl with the paint smeared on her cheeks and forehead.

Little son, there are only a few days left until we meet again, do not be lonely, behave yourself, listen to your mother and your aunt Tanya. Kisses, Papa.

The doors swoosh open as if they’ve been pulled apart by giants. “Moskovskaya,” a recorded voice announces the station. Am I home?

“To Citizen Shteyngart P., NOTIFICATION, Your husband Sergeant Shteyngart Isaac Semyonovich, fighting for the Socialist Motherland, true to his military oath, evincing heroism and courage, was killed 18 February 1943.”

We are outside the tiny village of Feklistovo, where, in 1943, the German line extended southwest of Leningrad. The Red Army attempted to break through the German encirclement and end the siege of the city on several occasions. Here, in one such attempt, my grandfather Isaac, my father’s father, an artillerist, was killed in battle.

Twenty-six million died on the Russian side in World War II, nearly 15 percent of the population. It is not an exaggeration to say the ground trod by my sneakers was once steeped in blood. It is not an exaggeration to say that those of us who are Russian, or Russian American, or Russian anything, are the offspring of these battles.

Outside the unremarkable soldiers’ mass grave, squared away between some fields and huts, there’s a local gentleman in a straw hat selling flowers. “He’s going to rip him off,” my mother says of the straw-hatted man, as my father ventures out of the car with about four dollars’ worth of Russian currency. When my father returns with a modest bunch of red roses, she tells him: “Later, he’ll come and resell the flowers you put on the grave.”

We are facing a monument of the Soviet socialist realism school, a soldier with a rifle slung over his chest, a silver helmet lying by his feet, surrounded by overgrown weeds. TO THE SOVIET WARRIORS WHO DIED IN BATTLES FOR THEIR MOTHERLAND 1941–44.

It is a sunny day, the first beautiful day of our trip. There’s the smell of frying sausages from the nearby country houses. Two grandmothers are sitting on a bench by the mass grave. “I come from Leningrad,” one of the grandmothers says. She’s in full babushka regalia, black raincoat and green kerchief wrapped around her head. “I have a dacha here.”

“I live here,” says Babushka Two.

“In 1943, my father died here,” my father says.

The grannies are silent for a moment.

Da,” they finally say.

“In February 1943,” my mother says. The fact that she has memorized the exact month of her husband’s father’s death is touching. I will memorize it, too.

“Maybe we’ll even find his name, son,” my father says as we begin to scour the overwhelming lists of the dead inscribed on the pink and white marble plates flanking the silver soldier statue on all sides. Somewhere amidst these green pastures, the hillocks covered with violets and daisies, my grandfather’s bones are buried.

“At least it’s a quiet place for a grave,” my father says.

“A good, quiet place,” my mother says, as if slotting herself into a Carver story. “The air is good.”

My father speaks: “Goodbye, goodbye, Father. I probably won’t come back again until my death. Forgive me. For everything.”

I laugh nervously. “You’re not guilty,” I say.

“I have a sense of guilt,” my father says. “That he didn’t live enough. In ’43 he was twenty-nine, maybe thirty. He didn’t see anything. What was it for? He left a little son, a wife.” He shakes his head.

“Oh, son,” he says to me, “why didn’t me and my mother come here earlier? I don’t know why she didn’t care about these things. We could have been here a hundred times. Of course, she was upset.”

What I notice is that he has stopped calling me “Little Son.” Now I am just his son. Now I stand at exactly the same height as him and our relationship is clear.

“Son, please read the prayer for me.” From his Velcro money pouch, my father pulls out a pamphlet with Jewish prayers to be said at a grave site. “Where’s the main prayer?” he asks. “Baruch …?”

As I write this, I’m looking at a photograph of my father in his early seventies holding an umbrella in the forecourt of Versailles, his right foot raised off the ground as if he is Gene Kelly, one of my Stuyvesant sweaters billowing out above his khaki pants. He is smiling at my mother and her camera, smiling fully, with teeth, in the American manner. “Singer in the rain,” my mother has written on a Post-it note in her careful English script. She has stuck the note above my father’s dancing figure.

The day after we visit my grandfather’s grave, we will go to the Great Choral Synagogue of St. Petersburg. I will ask my father if he ever visited the temple during his Soviet days. “Yes, five or six times,” he will say. “The first time I came, my aunt who later killed herself, Aunt Sima, she had her wedding here. I was about seventeen years old. And while that ceremony was taking place a girl entered. I remembered her my whole life. She wasn’t a beauty. She was dark, dark. A good Jewish face. And some kind of strange, almost glowing dark eyes. My whole life I have felt those eyes looking at me.”

“Lord, who should sojourn in thy tabernacle?” I read from Psalms 15:1 in English. “Who shall dwell upon thy holy mountain? He that walketh uprightly and walketh righteously and speaks with truth in his heart … He that does those things shall never be moved.”

I begin the mourner’s Kaddish. “Yitgaddal veyitqaddash shmeh rabba,” I say in Aramaic. My father bows slightly to God’s will with each cadence.

I say.

I chant.

I can read the prayer, but I cannot understand it. The words coming out of my mouth are gibberish to me. And they can only be gibberish to my father’s ear as well.

I chant the words and he says “Amen” after each stanza.

I chant the gibberish backwards and forwards, tripping over the words, mangling them, making them sound more Russian, more American, more holy. We haven’t found my grandfather’s name, Isaac, amidst the acres of marble covered with Ivans and Nikolais and Alexanders. But the sun shines generously. Cows are mooing and grass is being mowed. A small airplane, surely our heraldic symbol, is landing nearby. This part I know well.

Ve’imru, Amen.

Let us say, Amen.

: AMEH!



* He was forty.

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