6. My Madonnachka


The author’s beloved grandma Polya rejoins the family in Rome. She has flown in three kilograms of soap from Leningrad. A Soviet newscast has informed her of a shortage of soap in America.

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO READ like a Cold War spy novel. Security checks, East Berlin, Soviet customs agents. This was supposed to read like a Cold War spy novel, but the James Bond in question, me, can’t make kaka.

“Mama! Papa! Oooooooo!” It is the day before our departure for Western Europe and then America, and I am sitting on my little green potty — write a hundred-page novel, sure; but use an actual grown-up toilet, I’m too scared of falling in — and I can’t get the kakashka out.

Staraisya, staraisya, my parents urge me, one after the other. Try harder, try harder. Napryagis’. Strain yourself.

Later, I’m on the Culture Couch, my stomach still full of undigested cabbage, and I can’t sleep. The suitcases are packed, the living room where I sleep is now dominated by a pair of huge army-green sacks stuffed with decades of accumulated life, specifically the thick cotton comforter beneath which I struggle to stay alive; in fact, everything is packed, and the fighting between my parents has reached some kind of worried détente, the usual go-to-the-dicks and fuck-your-mothers and don’t-swear! replaced with gloomy, indeterminate whispers, even as the Bad Rocket belches its smoke outside, and I tremble within on the Culture Couch. I peek at the rising sun, at the signs for MEAT and PRODUCE. Everything is covered in frost. Real Russian frost. Every snowbank is a fortress on the scale of the turreted Engineers’ Castle, the snow pale and bled out by the brief winter sun. Anyone who has experienced such frost will never abide its mushy Western equivalent.

Neither Mama nor Papa has told me that we are about to leave the Land of the Soviets for good. My parents are paranoid that I might blab it to some adult in power, and our exit visas will be canceled. No one has told me, but I know. And I have staged my own form of protest. I have brought on the worst asthma attack yet, a sputtering of helplessness so obscene that my parents consider not leaving.

Our apartment near Moscow Square has been sold to the son of a high-ranking party member. The party member’s son and his dad are very keen to see us haul our Jewish asses out and take possession of every square foot of our former property, not to mention our explosive Signal black-and-white television. They will also get the shabby Culture Couch on which I’ve slept and dreamed cultured dreams, tried to play the violin and the balalaika, and, with the help of my grandma Galya, written my masterpiece Lenin and His Magical Goose. Also included in the price of the apartment, the floor-to-ceiling wooden ladder my father built to try to help me conquer my fear of heights and to make me into an Athlete.

Son of a Party Member stops by with his high-ranking father, who happens to have a medical degree. “We don’t know what to do,” my mother tells the Communist Party duo. “The child has asthma. Maybe we should stay.”

Dr. Apparatchik, keen to get the apartment into his Communist son’s hands, says, “My medical opinion is that you should go. There will be better care for asthma in the West.”

Which is so very true.

My mother decides we should proceed with our flight. In response, my asthma gets worse. I will not let them take me. In the morning, I try the potty again, but nothing doing, the cabbage inside me knows our destination better than I do. It desperately wants to emigrate to the West, to end its life inside a gleaming Viennese toilet.

The last minutes on Tipanov Street are hazy. Do we sit down for a silent moment before the journey, as is the Russian custom? What’s the point? This journey will have no end.

Taxi to the airport. And there the truth of the matter is revealed to me: Aunt Tanya is here and my aunt Lyusya, who will die a decade later of cancer that would be operable almost anywhere else, and her daughter, my cousin Victoria, the ballerina whose hand I touched through glass during my quarantine, who begs my mother, “I want to come with you!” Everyone is here except my grandma Galya, who is bedridden. Nas provozhayut. We are being “sent off,” meaning this is not just a jaunt down to Crimea or Soviet Georgia. This is final. But where are we going?

Wailing before the customs line, the Jews are saying goodbye to their relatives with all the emotion they are well known for, saying goodbye forever. And there are so many Jews headed out on the Leningrad — East Berlin flight that the shores of Brooklyn and the tree-lined boulevards of Queens and the foggy valleys of San Francisco are already groaning in anticipation. Eyes still wet, all of us Snotties today, we are searched thoroughly by customs agents. A big man in full uniform takes off my fur hat and pokes around the lining, looking for diamonds we may have stashed illegally within. As a child I have never been mistreated by the system. In Russia, as in socialist China, there is a special grace accorded to children — in both countries there is usually only one little emperor per family. But I am no longer a Soviet citizen, and I am no longer worth according any special childhood privileges. I do not know it, but I am a traitor. And my parents are traitors. And if a good many people got their wish we would be dealt with as traitors.

The customs agent is plunging his thick fingers into my fur hat, and the asthmatic me is so scared he does not even have the wherewithal not not to breathe. And so I gulp down the thick ammonia-and-sweat-scented air of the small Stalin-era international terminal of dodgy Pulkovo Airport. My parents are nearby, but for the first time in my life I am alone without them, standing before authority. The customs agent finishes fondling my hat and puts it back on my head with a combination of a smile and a sneer. I am leaving Russia, but he will never leave. If only the child-me could have the compassion to understand that monumental fact.

Down the customs line, our luggage and the two gigantic army-green sacks have been thrown open for inspection. Feathers are flying out of our prized red comforter as the pages of my mother’s beige leather address book — the names and phone numbers of some relatives in Queens — are being torn out for no good reason by a sadist in uniform, as if we are spies smuggling information to the West. Which, in a sense, we are.

And then we are clear of the formalities, and clear also of our relatives. Writing today I can guess the word in my mother’s mind: tragediya. It is a tragic day for her. My father’s mother will soon join us in America, but my mother will not see her mother until 1987, right before her death, by which point Grandma Galya will be too far gone to even recognize her second daughter. Until the reformist Gorbachev takes over, traitors to the Soviet Union are not allowed to return to visit their dying parents. I suppose I am feeling her sadness, because I am, as my mother likes to say, chutkiy, or sensitive. But truth be told, I am not chutkiy enough. Because all I can see in front of us is the Aeroflot plane, the Tupolev-154. On one of his didactic trips around the Chesme Church, my father has told me that the Tupolev is the fastest civilian jet ever built, faster than the American Boeing 727! Certainly faster than the toy helicopter we are launching at the church spires along with our aeronautical cheers of “URA!”

And now we are inside this sleek, magical airplane, the one that can so decisively outfly our Cold War rival’s, and rumbling past the vast airfield, past the denuded winter trees in the distance, past the acres of snow deep enough to hide a thousand children. Forget asthma. I, myself, am holding my breath before the wonder of it. Sure, I am afraid of heights, but being inside the futuristic Tupolev, the fastest civilian jet ever built, is akin to being wrapped in my father’s arms.

No one has told me where we are going, but I have already prepared to be a fine representative of the Soviet race. On my breast, beneath the monumental overcoat and the monumental winter sweater, is a shirt sold only in the USSR and perhaps in the more discriminating shops of Pyongyang. It is a green wide-collared thing with blue and green vertical stripes and, between the stripes, a galaxy of yellow polka dots. The terminals of the shirt are tucked into a pair of black pants that reach up to my kidneys, ostensibly to keep them warm in transit. I have pinned this shirt with the symbol of the upcoming 1980 Moscow Olympics, a stylized Kremlin capped with a red star. The fluid lines of the Kremlin are reaching toward the star because my nation is always reaching toward excellence. Beneath the Olympic pin is situated the pin of a smiling tiger’s face. This is in mourning of Tigr, my stuffed tiger, who is too big to make the journey to wherever it is we are going.

Which is where again? Mama and Papa remain silent and worried throughout the flight. My mother scans the airplane’s badly sealed window for drafts. Drafts, according to Russian medical lore, are the great, silent killers.

We land with a proper thud somewhere and taxi to a terminal. I am looking out the window and yobtiki mat’, fuck your mother, the sign — FLUGHAFEN BERLIN-SCHÖNEFELD — is not even in Russian anymore. Inside the terminal, past the officials in their green getups, an unfortunate, umlauted language is being spoken, my first understanding that the world is not powered entirely by the great and mighty Russian tongue.

“Papa, who are these people?”

“Germans.”

But aren’t we supposed to kill Germans? That’s what Grandpa did to them in the Great Patriotic War before they blew him up in his tank. (A childhood lie on someone’s part; as I’ve mentioned before, he was merely an artilleryman.) And yet, even the child in me senses the difference between here and home. East Berlin is the socialist showpiece of the entire Warsaw Pact, and the airport waiting lounge seems to hover somewhere between Russia and the West. There are dashes of chrome, if I remember correctly, and exotic nongray colors, purple or mauve perhaps. The men seem to be powered by some extraordinary force, a grim ability to walk forth in a straight line and to meaningfully declare things in their strange tongue. The difference, I am too young to understand, is that the men here are not completely, debilitatingly drunk.

Fuck your mother, please, where are we going?

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition, and this is the problem with sending an already disturbed child across not just national borders but, in the year 1978, across interplanetary ones. I have not had a full-blown asthma attack in twenty of the past nearly forty years, but even thinking of Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld shortens my breath as I write this. Here we are sitting surrounded by our possessions, two army-green sacks and a trio of orange suitcases made out of real Polish leather that leave my hands smelling like cow. Here I am next to Mama, who has just surrendered her dying mother. Here I am next to our family’s history, which I do not fully know yet, but which is every bit as heavy as our two army-green sacks. Here I am pushing my own history through East German customs, a history not even seven years old but already with its own mass and velocity. In practical terms, the army-green sacks are too heavy for a child, or a mama, to lift, but I push them forward with a kick whenever I can to help out my family. The instincts that will see me through my life are stirring for the first time: forward, move forward, keep going, keep kicking.

And then another Soviet plane, the water-bug-shaped, propeller-driven Ilyushin-18, bellies up to the terminal, and I am excited by the thought of a second plane ride in one day, even if instead of the Soviet carrier Aeroflot, its logo a hammer and sickle bracketed by a pair of enormous goose-like wings, we are seated within an East German airliner with the ugly name of Interflug and no Communist coat of arms to speak of. I am strapped in; the plane takes off for a very short (and loud and droning) flight south. Momentarily, we will land in a world unlike any we could have imagined, the one many will tell us is free.

But nothing is free.

Vienna. To this day passing through its fancy international airport is bittersweet. This is the first stop on what is becoming a regular three-part journey for Soviet Jews. First, Vienna, then Rome, then an English-Speaking Country Elsewhere. Or, for the true believers, Israel.

In addition to my Moscow Olympics pin and my homage to my tigr, a worn Soviet atlas accompanies me to Vienna. I love maps. With their longitudes crossing latitudes at precise ninety-degree angles, with the topographical yellows of the African veldt and the pale caviar grays of the Caspian Sea, maps will help make sense of the world spinning relentlessly beneath our feet.

The customs area at VIE is a madhouse of Russian immigrants collecting their worldly possessions. One of our swollen army-green sacks happens to burst in transit, spilling out one hundred kilograms of red compasses with yellow hammers and sickles that, unbeknownst to me, we are going to sell to Communist Italians. As Mama and Papa crawl on all fours trying to gather their wares, yobtiki mat’, yobtiki mat’, I subdue my sweaty worry by carefully tracing the frosty expanses of Greenland in my atlas—cold, cold, cold—rocking back and forth like a religious Jew. The first Western person I have ever seen, a middle-aged Austrian woman in a dappled fur coat, sees me davening over my maps. She elegantly steps over my parents and hands me a Mozart chocolate candy. She smiles at me with eyes the color of Lake Neusiedl, one of the largest in Austria according to my map of Central Europe. If I believe in anything now, it is in the providence of that woman.

But here is another thing that I see: My parents are on their knees. We are in a foreign country, and my parents are on the floor trying to gather the flimsy goods that are to sustain us through our journey.

On that night, we are “safe” in the West. We are staying in a Viennese rooming house called Pan Bettini, which is also being used by the local prostitutes. “Such classy prostitutes!” my mother exclaims. “They ride on bikes. They dress so subtly.”

“I know I’m not allowed chocolate,” I say, “but can I eat the Mozart candy? I’ll save the wrapper for later. It will be my toy.”

“Listen, little son,” my father says. “I can tell you a secret. We are going to America.”

I cannot breathe. He hugs me.

Or maybe it should be: He hugs me. I cannot breathe.

Either way, we are going to the enemy.

Christmas is coming to Vienna, and few cities take the holiday as seriously. Papa and I are walking down the broad Hapsburg boulevards lost to neon and red trim and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s thin-lipped visage and the occasional manger with its silent wooden Baby Jesus. In my thickly gloved hand I am holding my own Lord and Savior, an inhaler. My lungs are still swollen, the phlegm is rumbling inside, but the illness has been dealt a serious setback by that miracle of Western technology, courtesy of an ancient Viennese doctor whom my father has charmed with his broken German (“asthma über alles!”).

We are going to the enemy.

In my father’s hand a different kind of miracle, a banana. Who has ever heard of a banana in winter? But here in the Austrian capital, for less than a schilling, it is possible. The shopwindows are crammed with goods — vacuum cleaners with nozzles thin and powerful like the snouts of aardvarks; cutouts of tall, elegant women holding aloft jars of cream, their faces smiling like they mean it; models of healthy boys dressed haphazardly in ensembles of woolen caps, shockingly short winter jackets (but won’t these Austrian Jungen catch cold?), and gleaming corduroy pants. My father and I are walking mouths open, so that “a crow may fly in,” as the Russian saying goes. We have seen the Opera and the Wien Museum, but what has impressed us the most is the frighteningly fast black-and-yellow trams that zip us across town and to the Danube in minutes.

We are going to the enemy.

Here the first moral quandary sets in. The Viennese trams operate on the honor system. Do we use the few schillings we have to buy a ticket, or do we take advantage of the West’s generosity and buy more bananas? A source of much discussion, but in the end Papa decides that we better not upset the Austrians. Or you-know-what might happen again. All around us late-model Mercedeses sweep the gaily illuminated streets, lit to within an inch of daylight. There are thousands of us Soviet Jews stomping our way through Christmas Vienna that night, mouths agape, letting the pleasure and the horror of home-leaving finally wash over all of us, wondering if we really should have paid for that tram ticket. In our hotels, we have all been confronted with the shelf in the bathroom, containing not just one but two spare rolls of toilet paper. Before such magnificence our collective Soviet ethics yield. We grab the spare toilet paper and stuff it into the most sacred parts of our luggage, edging out all those degrees in mechanical engineering.

We are going to the enemy.

Holding our asthma inhaler and banana before us, my father and I walk up the stairs to our room in the Hotel for Prostitutes, where Mother is chastely waiting for us.

She bends down to my level to make sure the scarf has been tied correctly around my neck (any gaps, and my father will get it). “Are you breathing okay?” she asks me. Yes, Mama. I have my new inhaler.

Then to my father, “A banana! How can it be?” And not just that, my father tells her, throwing a whole bunch of bananas on the table and then reaching into his sack. They have marinated gherkins in jars. And also a powdered mushroom soup from a brand called Knorr. I look at the clear bright package on which the Knorr Corporation has drawn a cadre of herb-dotted mushrooms boiling themselves silly inside an octagonal bowl, and next to them an artist’s rendering of the actual ingredients: the saucy little mushrooms before they were thrown into the water and all the high-level vegetables that are just creaming to jump in alongside them.

My parents are in rapture over the marinated gherkins in jars.

I am in rapture over the Knorr soup, although I tell myself not to get too excited. We are going to the enemy.

“Eat, eat, little one,” my mother says. “While it’s hot, so that it can bring up the phlegm.”

“Decent soup, but not like ours back home,” my father says. “Real white mushrooms from the forest near Leningrad cooked in butter, and then you make the soup with sour cream and with lots of garlic. There’s nothing better!”

Already, the nostalgia. And the echoes of Soviet patriotism. But somehow this little packet of Knorr has produced enough mushroom soup to feed three refugees. Now there is only one thing to do. To peel the bananas and have an outrageous fruit dessert in the middle of December! One banana each, into our hungry refugee mouths, and tphoo!

“They are rotten! You’ve bought rotten bananas!”

We are going to the enemy.

The second part of the journey begins. The Israeli representatives have begged my parents to change their minds and get on an El Al flight straight to the Holy Land, where we can all be BIG JEWS together and stand up for ourselves (“Never Again!”) against our enemies in their checkered Arafat-style thingies, but my parents have courageously resisted. The letters from their relatives in New York have been emphatic, if cliché: “The streets here are paved with gold. We can sell leather jackets at the flea market.” Now we are boarding a series of trains that will take us to Rome and, from there, to one of the powerhouse English-speaking countries in desperate need of Soviet engineers, America or South Africa, say. The two army-green sacks and the trio of orange suitcases made out of real Polish leather are harnessed once more. We are on a cozy European train eating ham sandwiches and boring our way through the Alps to finally emerge on the other side. And then something inexplicable begins to happen. By which I mean: Italy.

My aunt Tanya’s belief that one of our ancestors, the magnificent Prince Suitcase, was the tsar’s representative to Venice may bear out in the end. Because once we reach Italy we become different people (although who doesn’t?). As the train rumbles southward, I take out my atlas and trace our journey topographically past the brown ridges of the Ligurian Alps, over the spine of the Apennines, and into darkest water-fed green. Green? Sure, we’ve encountered that color in Leningrad whenever the summer’s heat would disturb the winter snows for a month or two, but who could imagine green on this scale? And alongside the green, past the country’s boot-shaped boundaries, the deep blue of … Sredizemnoye More, the Mediterranean. And, fuck your mother, it’s December, but the sun is shining with atomic strength, shining early and bright in the winter morning, as our train pulls into Roma Termini, a train station of enormous fascist span, which, to borrow from my future best friend Walt Whitman, contains multitudes: a noisy mélange of Russians, Italians, and Gypsies, each with their own rallying cry. Yes, there will be bananas here. Better bananas. And tomatoes nurtured by the motherly figure of the Italian sun. Tomatoes that explode in the mouth like grenades.

One is cautioned by the better critics never to write about photographs. They are an easy substitute for prose, a hackneyed shortcut, and, besides, they lie like all images do. So what am I to make of the photo of my small family — Mama and Papa and me between them — sitting on a worsted blanket in a chipped, dingy apartment in Ostia, a seaside suburb of Rome? My father has his arm around my mother’s shoulder, and my love is divided between his knee and her cheekbone. She is in a turtleneck and a knee-length skirt, smiling with all of her remarkably natural (for a Soviet émigrée) white teeth. He, in a white shirt and jeans, with his prominent Adam’s apple, his Italian-black goatee and sideburns, is beaming in a more restrained way for the camera, the lower lip, usually set in an unhappy position, be it sadness or anger, dragooned into happiness. And between them I am rosy cheeked, aflame with health and joy. I am still the owner of the same stupid Soviet polka-dot shirt, but most of it is hidden by a new Italian sweater, its shoulders ringed with something like epaulets, so that I may continue the fantasy that I will join the Red Army someday. My hair is as long and unruly as the Italian state, and the gap between my crooked teeth is its own opera, but the rings under my eyes that have made such an underaged raccoon out of me are gone. My mouth is open and, through the gap in my teeth, I am breathing in mouthfuls of the warm, ennobling Roman air. This photo is the first indication I have of all three of us together happy, ecstatic, as a family. If I may go so far, it is the first anecdotal evidence I have that joy is possible and that a family can love each other with as much abandon as it can muster.

Five months in Rome!

We are mostly at leisure. Our pastel apartment is crumbling but cheap, rented from a small but budding Odessa mafioso, who will soon seek greener pastures in Baltimore. Our days are filled with churches and museums, Colosseums and Vaticans, and, on Sundays, the Porta Portese market in Trastevere, a rambunctious, nearly Balkan bazaar by a bend in the Tiber River. My father, a so-so mechanical engineer and unfulfilled singer (“How they used to applaud me when I sang!”), has been readying for America by becoming a minor businessman. The American Jews, guilty over their inaction during the Holocaust, have been exceedingly kind to their Soviet brethren, and most of our five-month wait in Rome — our application for refugee status in the United States is still being processed — is generously paid for by their gathered funds. But Papa has bigger ideas! Each week we pack an army-green sack with Soviet crap bound for Porta Portese. There are stacks of green East German sheet music for symphonies by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Why Italians would want to buy such artifacts is now beyond me, but it is almost as if my father, not fully convinced of the journey ahead, is saying, I am a worthy person who has lived for forty cultured years on this earth. I am not just some Cold War loser. He also sells a samovar to a kind Italian couple, an engineer and a music teacher, a mirror image of my father and mother, and they invite us to bowls of spaghetti so dense we become confused by the gluttony. How can anyone eat so much food? In America, we will see how.

Before we left Leningrad, the émigré party line has informed us of an interesting quirk. While half of the Eastern Bloc would likely get up and move to Missouri if given the chance, the crazy Italians can’t get enough of communism. They can even get pretty violent about it. The newspapers are still screaming about the Brigate Rosse, the Red Brigades, and how an industrialist’s son had recently been kidnapped and had part of his ear cut off. Still, business is business, and anything Russian is huge. A fat big-bosomed former prostitute from Odessa stalks the beaches of our seaside Ostia, shouting, “Prezervatiff! Prezervatiff!” as she peddles Soviet condoms to the amorous locals. Given their poor quality, I wonder how many inadvertent future Italians owe their existence to her wares. Meanwhile, our neighbor, a timid Leningrad doctor, ventures out to the pier with a bale of Soviet heart medicine. “Medicina per il cuore!” he croons. The local police think he’s peddling heroin and pull out their pistole. The timid doctor, all glasses and big bald dome, runs off as the police fire warning shots after him. He is unwilling to let go of the giant umbrella he has used to shield himself from the warm Italian rain. The sight of the Jewish doctor and the umbrella escaping down the Mediterranean coast with the carabinieri in tow warms our hearts and provides endless conversations over the cheap chicken liver that constitutes most of our diet. (The prized tomatoes and balls of mozzarella are for once a week only.)

I am given a more lucrative, and more legal, sales line: compasses emblazoned with the yellow hammer and sickle against a red background. At Porta Portese, I walk around the perimeter of the bed-sheet that defines our stake, brandishing a sample compass and hollering at passersby with my now-healthy little boy’s lungs, “Mille lire! Mille lire!” A thousand lire, less than a dollar, is what each of the compasses costs, and the Italians, they are not animals. They see a poor refugee boy in a polka-dot-vertical-striped shirt, they will give him a thousand lire. “Grazie mille! Grazie mille!” I reply as the money is thrust in one hand and a little piece of Russia leaves another.

I am allowed to hang on to some of those mille lire notes, Giuseppe Verdi’s bewhiskered punim winking back at me from the currency. My obsession is guidebooks. Cheap English guidebooks, their spines a glob of glue and some string, with encompassing names like All Rome and All Florence and All Venice. I set up a little treasure chest of books in the tiny room we share in Ostia, and I try to read them in English, with limited success. The English-Russian dictionary is introduced to my world, along with the new non-Cyrillic alphabet. And then the words: “oculus,” baldacchino, “nymphaeum.” “Papa, what does this mean?” “Mama, what does that mean?” Oh, the pain of having an inquisitive child.

The American Jews are now flinging money at us with abandon (three hundred U.S. dollars a month!), the hammer-and-sickle compasses are really paying off, so we use the proceeds to take guided bus tours of Florence and Venice and everything in between. Brimming with All Florence knowledge I interrupt the lackadaisical Russian tour guide at the Medici Chapel. “Excuse me,” my nerdish voice rings out across the marble. “I believe you are not correct, Guide. That is Michelangelo’s Allegory of Night. And this is the Allegory of Day.”

Silence. The guide consults his literature. “I believe the boy is right.”

A rustle in the midst of the Russian refugees, a dozen doctors and physicists and piano geniuses among them. “That boy knows everything!” And then, most important, to my mother, “A delightful child. How old is he?”

I am lapping it up. “Six. Almost seven.”

“Remarkable!”

Mother hugs me. Mother loves me.

But knowing things is not enough. And neither is Mama’s love. In a church gift shop I buy a little golden medal depicting Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca. Haloed Baby Jesus is so porky here, so content with his extra protecting layer of flesh, and Mary’s beatific sideward glance drips with so much devotion and pain and understanding. What a lucky boy Jesus is. And what a beautiful woman is Mary. Back in Ostia, I develop a hideous secret vice. While my parents are off hustling Tchaikovsky sheet music or talking to the criminal Leningrad doctor and his young childless wife, I hide in the bathroom or somewhere lonely in the depths of our room. I take out the Madonna del Granduca and I cry. Crying is not allowed because (1) it’s not manly and (2) it can bring on asthma with all that snot. But, alone, I let the tears drop out of me with complete hot abandon as I kiss and kiss the beatific Virgin, whispering, “Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Santa Maria.”

The American Jews are paying for us, but the Christians are not content to let entire herds of confused, post-Communist Jews just wander past. There is a Christian center nearby, which we call the Amerikanka, in honor of the American Baptists who run it. They bait us in with some dried meat and noodles, only to show us a full-color film about their God. A reckless, know-it-all hippie motorcyclist is lost amid the Sahara Desert, he runs out of water, and, just as he is about to die, Jesus comes over to dispense precious water and career advice. The production values are terrific. In the bathroom of our flat I cradle the Madonna del Granduca. “I just saw your Son in the film, Santa Maria. He was bleeding so much. Oh, my poor Madonnachka.”

The next week the workers at the local Jewish organization decide to up the ante. They screen Fiddler on the Roof.

Beloved Grandma Polya arrives from Leningrad and, with her sparse hair and country smile, accompanies me on trips across Rome, walking me up and down the Tiber in my snazzy new Italian light coat, watching the sun do things to the enormity of St. Peter’s Dome or wondering at the Pyramid of Cestius rising out of the ancient ocher cityscape. “Grandma, aren’t pyramids supposed to be in Egypt?” The map of Rome is so worn there are thumb-bored holes where the Colosseum and the Piazza del Popolo should be, and I have truly destroyed the Villa Borghese. Grandma, sweating in the new heat, looks around apprehensively. More than fifty years before, she was born in a stifling Ukrainian village, and now she is in the Caput Mundi. “Grandma, did the Romans really vomit in the Baths of Caracalla?”

“Perhaps they did, little Igor. Perhaps they did.”

Grandma has other things to worry about. Her husband Ilya, my father’s stepfather, is a dour worker whose own best buddies in Leningrad have nicknamed him Goebbels. By Russian standards he is not an alcoholic, meaning he is not drunk from eight in the morning until pass-out time at night. Still Grandma Polya has had to carry him off the tram more than once, and more than twice he has beshat himself in public. Since his arrival, our small rooms in Ostia are loud with battle. One day I find a treasure on the staircase of Grandma’s building, a gold watch encrusted with possible diamonds. My father returns it to the Italian family living atop Grandma and Ilya, and they offer him a fifty-dollar reward. Puffed with pride, my father generously refuses the astronomic sum. The Italians counter with a five-dollar reward and a free trip to a local café for a cappuccino and some panini. “Idiot!” Ilya shouts at my father, with his little gopher-like head atremble and the perpetual web of spittle in front of him. “Good-for-nothing! We could have been rich! A diamond watch!”

“God will see my deed and bless me,” Papa replies magnanimously.

“God will see how stupid you are and never send you anything else!”

“Shut your stinking mouth!”

“Go to the dick!”

“Don’t swear. The child can hear.”

In my bathroom with my Raphael Madonna as the adult world trembles around me: “Santa Maria, Santa Maria, Santa Maria.” And then my memorized list of Roman Forum ruins: “Temple of Saturn, Temple of Vespasian, Temple of Castor and Pollux, Temple of Vesta, Temple of Caesar.”

Two handsome Americans from the CIA come to interview Papa. They want to know about his previous job at the LOMO (Leningrad Optical Mechanical Amalgamation) factory, present-day makers of the hipster cameras used in Lomography, but back in 1978 manufacturers of telescopes and sensitive military technology. Of course, my father has never been anywhere near the sensitive military stuff. He had been known to conduct “disruptive pro-Zionist and anti-Soviet conversations” about Israel and the 1967 Six-Day War, possibly the most glorious six days of his life, until one day his boss called him in and said, “Fuck your mother, Shteyngart, you can’t do anything right! Get out of here!” A stroke of luck to have a father with such a big mouth, for had he become acquainted with the factory’s military technology, we would never have been allowed to leave the Soviet Union.

The enemy spooks leave empty-handed, but one day my father sits me down for a chat. My toys, at the time, in addition to my Mozart candy wrapper and my Madonna, are two clothespins with which we hang our laundry to dry in the Mediterranean heat. One is a red “Tupolev” and the other a blue “Boeing.” Whenever I’m not drooling over the Sistine Chapel, I do my boy’s stuff. I race the two airplanes across the quiet Ostia streets, across the cold sands of the nearby beaches, always letting the Tupolev plane win over the enemy jetliner.

The skies over Ostia are sunny and the May air is brisk, the perfect atmosphere for a U.S.-USSR jet race.

My father and I are sitting on the shabby bedspread in our apartment. I prepare my Boeing and Tupolev clothespins. And he tells me what he knows. It was all a lie. Communism, Latin Lenin, the Komsomol youth league, the Bolsheviks, the fatty ham, Channel One, the Red Army, the electric rubber smell on the metro, the polluted Soviet haze over the Stalinist contours above Moscow Square, everything we said to each other, everything we were.

We are going to the enemy.

“But, Papa, the Tupolev-154 is still faster than the Boeing 727?”

In a resolved tone: “The fastest plane in the world is the Concorde SST.”

“One of our planes?”

“It is flown by British Airways and Air France.”

“So. It means. You’re saying …”

We are the enemy.

I am walking down the Ostia boardwalk with my grandmother. In the distance is the Luna Park’s sad little Ferris wheel I am still too afraid to ride. The Tupolev and the Boeing take off, and I clatter down the wooden runway with the two clothespins in my hands above my head, circling my grandma Polya, who lumbers forward lost in her own thoughts, smiling occasionally because her little grandson is healthy and running around with two clothespins. The red pin, the Tupolev, instinctively reaches for the sky, wants to win over the blue Boeing, just as the stylized lines of the Kremlin are reaching for the red star, because we are a nation of workers and strivers. We.

The goal of politics is to make us children. The more heinous the system the more this is true. The Soviet system worked best when its adults — its men, in particular — were welcomed to stay at the emotional level of not-particularly-advanced teenagers. Often at a dinner table, a male Homo soveticus will say something uncouth, hurtful, disgusting, because this is his teenager’s right and prerogative, this is what the system has raised him to be, and his wife will say, Da tishe! — Be quiet! — and then look around the table, embarrassed. And the man will laugh bitterly to himself and say, Nu ladno, it’s nothing, and wave away the venom he has left on the table.

The blue pin is overtaking the red pin, the Boeing is too fast, too well designed, to lose. I do not want to be a child. I do not want to be wrong. I do not want to be a lie.

We are crossing the Atlantic on an Alitalia Rome-JFK flight. The stewardess, as devoted and beautiful as the Madonna in my pocket — my Moscow Olympics pin is swimming in the Mediterranean — brings me a special gift, a glossy map of the world and a collection of stickers representing the various models of Boeing in the Alitalia stable. I am encouraged to pin the Boeings all over the map. Here is the vast red terra incognita of the Soviet Union, and there is the smaller blue mass of the United States with its strange Floridian growth on one side. Between these two empires lies the rest of the world.

Our plane dips its wing as it approaches, and we catch a jumble of tall gray buildings filling up the window like the future. We are approaching the last twenty years of the American Century.

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