father.
I pushed my face against the window. Traffic bumper to bumper. Crowds on the street. Neon. Billboards. Shops. A city I hardly knew, and then I saw him just near Lubyanka Square, the KGB headquarters where he had his office when I was a kid.
The huge yellow stone building, where the statue of the founder of the Russian secret police was “hanged” when communism collapsed, hanged, hauled away. I always loved meeting my dad there because the KGB was next to Detsky Mir, Kids’ World, the greatest toy shop on earth, it had seemed then. I remembered. Lubyanka, with its terrifying jail, was sometimes joked about and in private called “Adults’ World”.
I saw my dad, walking along, perhaps heading to his office, swinging his good American leather briefcase in which he brought home my chocolates.
Alionka had been my favorite of all the sweets he brought home-cranberries in sugar, a chocolate rabbit for New Year’s, Stolichnaya with the same label as the vodka and vodka inside the candies.
Outside the window, the evening sun lit him up, as he dodged traffic, and jogged gracefully across the street, carrying the briefcase he had brought home from America, which he polished every night at the kitchen table.
You think it smells of America, my mother always said a little dismissively, but he was proud of it because other officers carried satchels made out of East German leather, or even cardboard. On my father’s fine leather case was a label that read Mark Cross.
In the 1950s and 1960s, when my father was a young hero of the KGB, times were good, he always said. Khrushchev times, when you could honorably defend your country, and people felt good about doing it, or some of them did. Things were changing. Sputnik went up in l957 and we were full of ourselves, we Soviets, and then Yuri Gagarin. They had believed, some of them, we would see the great days of real socialism, that we would rule the world in a just way.
When I was a baby, my father went to America, he was in New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My mother told me that during the crisis she had gone to bed some nights expecting not to wake up in the morning. My father was away from home. She was alone with me in the apartment in Moscow, and she kept me in her bed.
How I had adored him, my father who brought home chocolate candies wrapped in gold foil paper from a special store, and who took me fishing. He talked to me in English. We had a nice place to live, or that’s how it seemed to me back then, until things started going sour for us, my mother talking too loud, saying too much, telling people how pissed off she was at the failures of the USSR, especially after Brezhnev.
My father lost his job. We lost our apartment. We left Moscow for Israel.
My mother was still there, in a nursing home in Haifa. Alzheimer’s meant she didn’t know my name. But she still smoked secretly.
In our apartment in Moscow, I had once come into the living room to find the desk she used on fire. I poured water over it, and when she came home, my mother said, “What happened?” She admitted to me when she had a cigarette, she blew the smoke into the drawer. This last time, she had dropped the butt into the drawer, too. Some paper caught fire. After that we laughed and laughed about it. My mother’s “smoking drawer”, we called it.
Why did I think about it now? I thought about them both, her, my father. In Israel, he had been blown up on a bus by a bomb, a mistake, intended for another location.
Is it good? Do you like it? The girls twittered like high-pitched birds gathered at feeding time.
It’s good, I said. Very nice chocolate for sure, I said. Thank you. Yes, wonderful chocolate.
It is better than American? asked Kim who confided to me that her real name was Svetlana but everybody called her Kim after her grandmother whose name stood for Kommuni-stichesky International Molodezhny. It meant Communist Youth International, she explained and added that her great-grandmother had been called Vladlena, for Vladimir Ilych Lenin.
“First for the while we love Mars Bars, Snickers, my older sister who is now already thirty, she tells me everything is good if it comes from West. She loves this West. She wants everything West. But now we prefer our own candies,” said Kim. “It is much better. Higher percentage chocolate,” she explained, and mentioned that her grandmother had worked in the Red October factory, and had explained all of these things. Her grandmother, she added, had actually seen Comrade Stalin. The other girls sighed slightly.
Shut up! I wanted to shout at these hectic children: shut up. But I smiled and said, okay, you win, better than American candy bars. I like this chocolate very much, I said, speaking in the slow loud deliberate way Americans do when they’re in foreign countries, as if everybody around them is stupid or deaf. This seemed to make them happy and the girls smiled at each other knowingly. I was an okay kind of American.
Being in Moscow, looking out that window, seeing my father in the street, knowing it was a hallucination, it made me feel a little nuts. He was dead.
Maybe I had seen his ghost. In Moscow, you could believe in ghosts if you let go of your own present and let the past flood you.
Tall, tan, athletic, braces on her teeth, Kim, who was now chattering with the other girls, could have been European, American, Australian, except that she was in love with her president. And her expression, when she mentioned him, was a little bit crazy. Shining with devotion. She reminded me of a little girl I had been in the Komsomol with. I had been a young Pioneer, like everyone else, white shirt, red neckerchief.
My father had imposed it on me, and anyhow it was what everybody I knew did. In our group was one girl, very pale, blue eyes, hair the color and texture of corn-silk, braided and wound around her head, and when we sang patriotic songs, she was the one who always announced the concert by sounding out “Vladimir Ilych Lenin” in a piercing, shrill, high, zealous voice. She believed. She was a believer because she came from a working-class family, the father a drunk, the mother a factory cleaner, who had only their belief, and the bundles of dripping meat allocated to the mother at work.
A world long gone, replaced by one with easy access to food and chocolate, but admired by these girls, sentimentalized by them, and sometimes even their parents. In my time, at least when we went home, we took off our public faces. We made fun of the crappy culture and preferred the Beatles.
We hung out like young hoods in Pushkin Square, near the statue of the great Russian poet-hero, exchanging titbits of information about John, Paul, George and Ringo and wondering, as we examined forbidden pictures, which one was which. Tolya always said to me it was the Beatles who brought down communism.
“It caused us to defect internally from the system, Artyom,” he always said. “It made us flee from everything around us inside our souls.”
Where are you? I thought. Tolya, where are you for God’s sake?
“Say cheese!” Suddenly, Kim, picked up her phone and snapped my picture. The other girls followed. There was something about Kim of the little spy, taking pictures, hoarding them, as she chattered about the fatherland, the need to resettle internal immigrants back where they came from, especially if they came from the Caucasus.
One of the little girls-she was about nine-let off a stream of invective about the foreigners, as she called them, the Caucasians and the others who came to Moscow to work at the markets and clean the streets, and how dirty they were and how frightened her mother was of them.
Don’t talk to these dirty animals, her mother had told her. Don’t let them touch you.
I waited for the translation, but Kim told the girl she must not use nasty language, especially in front of foreigners, even if they didn’t understand, it wasn’t nice, and suddenly I got the feeling Kim knew I spoke Russian, that I understood. But she only smiled and we all smiled some more and I finished the chocolate bar to the amusement of all the little girls.
At the bus terminal, the girls said goodbye to me, and the tiny one with the big stuffed bear kissed my cheek. Kim handed me a second chocolate bar from her bag, and asked me to write down my name and my phone number and the hotel where I was staying. She planned on asking her mom if she could invite me to their house for tea. I said thanks and gave her a phony name-I became Max Fielding-and jotted down the National Hotel because it was all I could think of, and we all smiled some more, and then the girl who hated Caucasians turned around and snapped my photograph with her silver digital camera.
Snap snap. Suddenly all the girls got out their phones and little digital cameras and took more pictures of each other, and of me, each one posing with me, then posing in groups. Snap snap.
Come on, please, said Kim, one more, one more picture, so I can keep you. Okay, now with my mom, and she beckoned her mother, a good-looking woman with pale platinum hair who posed with me, and shook my hand and said I was welcome.
They tumbled into each other’s arms to say goodbye and waved at parents who were waiting and then they
