Russian Tattoo Read Free Page B

Robert’s mother’s house in New Jersey. The car Robert used to pick me up at the airport belongs to his father, he said with a glimmer of pride in his eyes at being the only American who doesn’t own a vehicle.
    The Washington air trembles with heat as we walk along a rectangular pool that seems to be steaming. Low, uniform buildings, a tall obelisk, huge expanses of space so strange in a major city. Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument. I should’ve brushed up on American history, as my university dean told me to do during his harangue about my betrayal of Leningrad University and the entire Soviet Union because I married an American.
    I compare what I see to our capital, Moscow, where the scale of everything is so much grander. I think of our May 1, Labor Day, marches and Victory Day parades that are supposed to energize us with their rows of tanks and lines of rockets rolling past the Lenin Mausoleum; of endless lines for Czech mascara, bologna, and Polish boots. We cannot afford to smile at every customer in Russia or wrap each sandwich, even if we had the meat or the paper, even if we had a word for service .
    â€œLet’s stop for iced tea,” says Robert and points to a café entrance.
    I am stunned that you can simply stop for a drink here—a random detour, a result of an individual’s whim—and no one is going to yell at you for trying to be special, for standing out from the collective. But I am even more astonished at the notion of iced tea. What kind of sacrilege is this? Everyone knows that tea must be served scalding hot. I don’t say anything to Robert as I consider this just American ignorance. But I also think of the waitress who didn’t scowl at us as we sat at her table and who pretended that our order of iced tea was exactly what she’d been waiting for. It was so utterly un-Soviet in its cheeriness that it made me giggle.
    â€œLife’s a kopek,” my mother would always say, and now I think I am beginning to understand what our most popular proverb really means.
    How am I going to get used to all this sudden worthiness?

Three
    M y new mother-in-law lives in a pomestie nestled in the woods called Princeton, New Jersey. A pomestie is a sprawling country house with land, a kind of dwelling surrounded by an orchard as thick as a forest, where many of Chekhov’s characters lamented their lives and yearned for Moscow. At first glance, my mother-in-law didn’t seem to lament anything. She pressed me to her soft T-shirt that said WOMEN UNITE and we had sweet drinks made from a dark cordial I’d never seen. My tongue wouldn’t contort to calling the woman I’d just met mother , so I call her Millie.
    As I explored the vast premises of Millie’s estate, I knew my real mother was fretting in our Leningrad kitchen across from my older sister, wondering if I’d already settled down to live under a bridge or was begging on the street, like most Americans. We all saw a recent Soviet documentary shot in New York and broadcast on our TV at least three times before I left. A Man from Fifth Ave. showed men and women sleeping on the pavement amid a crowd of indifferent capitalists on their way to restaurants and stores. I haven’t yet seen the real Fifth Avenue, with half its population begging for scraps, so what I can write back home has no relevance to anyone in Leningrad. What can I possibly tell my family that they would understand? That roads in New Jersey are jammed with cars they’ve never seen? That supermarkets nearby are the size of stadiums, brimming with foods they couldn’t even dream up? That no matter how hard I look, I haven’t seen even one line?
    I wrote in my letter that Robert had caught a cold and I was treating him with tea and honey, in the absence of raspberry jam from the dacha. I wrote that Millie appreciated the set of painted spoons and the shawl with roses my mother had