Russian Tattoo Read Free Page A

pieces of furniture required for every respectable home: a cupboard filled with cut crystal and a piano called Red October. I hated dusting the cupboard and the piano. I hated practicing the piano, too, and this double aversion kept me away from my sister’s room, which suited us both. But now my Leningrad bed next to my mother’s, with its white duvet and square pillow, floats in my memory, feathery and warm, next to an undusted sideboard full of porcelain ballerinas and a bottle of my mother’s sweet perfume called Red Moscow. I used to sit in front of her triple mirror, where nothing interesting was ever reflected, and wonder whether I could ever leave. And now, half a world away, I can smell that perfume.
    It takes a few minutes for alien objects to come into focus, until one thing becomes sharp and real: I am no longer home.

    It is early morning, and we go down to the kitchen full of strange bottles on the counter and cardboard boxes in the cabinets. The house belongs to a former professor of Robert’s, who let us stay here for two days before we drive to New Jersey, where Robert’s mother lives. The professor is round and balding and doesn’t look at all professorial.
    Robert asks him something, and the professor launches into what sounds like a lecture, most of which I don’t understand. The words stream out of his mouth—words that sound vaguely familiar, yet distorted with the yawning vowels and the r ’s that have broken out of control in their mad attempt to take over other sounds. And the unseemly intonation: a wild rhythm galloping in all directions, like unbroken horses in Westerns I have yet to see. American English—all wrong, as my British-trained professors warned me back home. I spent fifteen years trying to master proper British English—the language no one seems to speak here.
    In my family, no one spoke a foreign language, especially one as foreign as English. My mother knew the names of all the body parts in Latin, but Latin wasn’t exotic; it was ancient and dead. My father spoke nothing but Russian. Marina studied French at her Moscow drama school, but French was so ingrained in Russian history that even my provincial aunt Muza sometimes said, “Merci beaucoup . ” English was regal and mesmerizing, unknown and rarely heard. It was my way out of the ordinary life—the same escape my sister found in theater and acting. When I was ten, the year my father died, I insisted on learning English the same way Marina had earlier insisted on auditioning for the Moscow drama school.
    Every day, for the three months of summer, I took a streetcar to a tutor’s apartment to contort my mouth around unfamiliar sounds until it hurt, to learn the twelve tricky tenses, to make the bewildering discovery that Russian had no word for privacy . Thirteen years of English classes later, I’d been selected to teach Russian to visiting American students at the Leningrad University summer program. Robert was in my friend Nina’s class. That was exactly a year ago.
    I look around Robert’s professor’s kitchen as if it were another museum. “Would you like some cereal?” asks his wife, tall and broad-boned, not interested in her husband’s lecture.
    I imagine a pot with steaming farina, mannaya kasha, the cereal my sister refused to swallow when she was little. Marina would hold the kasha in her mouth for hours, her cheeks bulging, not letting even a drop slide down her throat. Unlike my sister, I’ve always liked farina, hot and gooey, made with milk and lots of sugar, a cube of butter slowly dissolving in the center of a steaming heap. But the professor’s wife reaches for a cardboard box with a picture of brown flakes and raisins, and the mixture rattles into my bowl with the same sound you’d hear if you poured a handful of nails.

    This is our last day in the capital of my new country because this evening we are driving to