Russian Tattoo Read Free

years ago, when I was ten. “Smoked since he was nine,” my mother lamented to a neighbor on that day. “So what do you expect?” I didn’t know what she’d hoped for, but I expected him to stay alive. In our neighbor’s apartment, after the funeral, his friends from the Leningrad Technical School drank vodka toasts to his shining memory, to his party leadership, to my mother, my sisters, and me. Uncle Volodya, my father’s driver, asked everyone to drink to my father’s fishing. “The greatest happiness of his life was sitting in a boat with his line cast,” he said, long bags under his eyes making his face even sadder as my mother pursed her lips because she probably considered herself to have been the greatest happiness of his life.
    I thought of the Renaissance paintings in the Hermitage, where our third-grade teacher, Vera Pavlovna, had taken our class the previous spring, of souls fluttering in the clouds alongside harp-playing angels. “We no longer believe in heaven,” she announced, standing next to an icon, and a week later, as if to make the point, arranged a school trip to the Museum of Religion and Atheism at Kazan Cathedral. As we stood in front of the gilded altar, Vera Pavlovna condemned the atavisms of the tsarist past as backward beliefs about heaven and afterlife.
    â€œHeaven is church mythology made up in an effort to suppress the populace,” she said. “To distract their attention from everyday struggles.”
    I liked the Hermitage elongated angels and Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna with a fat baby in her arms. But our teacher told us to think of all those floating souls in the densely populated skies as nothing but symbols, the way a snake under the feet of Peter the Great’s horse in the Bronze Horseman monument on the Neva River was a symbol of all the tsar’s enemies who didn’t want him to build a city on a cold swamp infested with mosquitoes. The same way Pushkin’s poems teemed with speaking souls and fiery prophets. And though I hated to agree with our teacher who demanded that we marched in step with the school collective, I found it difficult to believe that anyone could still hope to rise to heaven after death. You died in a hospital, like my father, and then you were buried in the ground.
    In a dream I had about my father’s funeral, Uncle Volodya announced he was leaving. I got up and lurked in the doorway between the living room and the entrance hallway so he would notice me, because in my mind he was directly linked to my father.
    â€œHe was a good man,” said Uncle Volodya and patted me on the cheek.
    I wondered if I would ever see Uncle Volodya again, and that thought suddenly made me so sad that I could feel the tears rising, but I swallowed hard and pretended I was coughing. Uncle Volodya put on a raincoat and a hat, his skin hanging under his eyes and around his mouth as if tired of holding on to his face. Then the heavy double doors locked behind him and he was gone.
    I tried not to think about Uncle Volodya anymore; I tried not to think about my father. I stood in the hallway’s soft dusk under a coatrack, trying not to think at all, but thoughts marched in, like columns of the suppressed populace protesting the church’s mythology of heaven. I thought of the only time I went fishing with my father: a slippery perch glistening in my hands, a purple worm squiggling in an inch of water on the bottom of the boat, my father’s fingers, black from dirt, hooking it onto the end of my fishing rod.

    As I wake up, unfamiliar images float in through gummy eyes: a bulky dresser with a giant television, a floor covered with something soft and beige, a wool blanket without a duvet cover. The walls are naked, too, not sheathed with wallpaper.
    I can almost smell the woody musk of our Leningrad armoire in the room where my mother and I slept, the dusty air of Marina’s room with the two