“I don’t like your hair that color,” she said.
“The black?” I replied as I positioned a photograph of my father above the headboard of her sagging cot. “Shall I hang the picture of Father here?”
“You look like a whore,” she added.
I had taken that picture of Father outside our dacha near Lake Ladoga, north of Leningrad, shortly before he was arrested in 1952. He was gardening in the blue coveralls he wore for his job at the loading docks at the shipyards on the Neva. He took that job after the school where he taught literature fired him for assigning
Father read to me in English. It was his favorite language. A good balance for our harsh Russian minds, he would say. Every night until I was thirteen he filled my head with Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Dickens. Big books, every word, one at a time. He laughed at the attitudes of French and Italian, and was uncomfortable with the wild tempo of Spanish. I am not partial, but from him I learned my English very well. Then he was gone.
But back to my mother. “I think it looks dramatic,” I said, referring to my hair color as I hammered a nail into the wall with the heel of my shoe.
The photograph was the only decoration in the room. I sat on the cot next to my mother and stroked her arms up and down gently, tickling the hairs along her raised blue veins. She slowly rocked back and forth. Her crippled hands, which had once kneaded mounds of flour and water into sourdough bread, felt dry and brittle, like kindling that could be snapped.
“What’s that smell? You ate garlic?” she said, sniffing in my direction.
She hated garlic, and I’d had garlic soup for lunch.
“Father looks handsome in that picture, don’t you think?”
“Police eat garrr-lic…I itch.”
“Where?” I asked.
“My ass has sores from the sandpaper they use for sheets.”
“Petroleum jelly?” I had packed some with her things.
“You’re a hussy who fucks the police!”
“Moth—” I stopped myself.
No point to protest.
She continued, “Don’t touch me, you reeking whore!”
I had grown accustomed to Mother’s ill-tempered dementia. The five other women who shared her room also ignored her rants. A bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling cast shadows of the six cots and divided the room into long, dark corridors. A burning coal stove left a darkened halo of soot on the pink plaster ceiling. I was sweating, and my mother had difficulty breathing. The roommates were at the commissary having tea and cake. Mother waited till they finished because she preferred not to talk to them and liked the tea at its darkest, from the bottom of the samovar.
“I need it strong for my digestion,” she would say.
“Would you like me to walk you downstairs?” I asked.
“And then are you also going to wipe my ass?”
“No, Mother. Good-bye, Mother.”
I kissed her forehead and left her sitting at the very edge of the cot, her stockinged feet barely touching the floor. The starch in her flowered dress helped her to sit up straight, and the dampened heat of the room made her white hair into a frizzy, glowing halo. She looked like a mad angel awaiting a task from the Almighty.
She yelled after me, “I’ll be dead soon, Stalina. Remember, you ate cake while Stalin lay dying!”
Leaving her room, I looked through the hallway windows at the clouds hanging high above our newly renamed St. Petersburg. I imagined my angel mother soaring with wings spread wide, shouting her words down to earth like a trumpet: “Come near me and I’ll show you my ravaged ass, then I’ll take a nip of yours and spit it down your throat! I’m going to cripple you to your toes with nausea, that way you cannot leave me.”
Walking down the hallway, I could hear her rugged smoker’s cough followed by a wet gurgling sound from deep within her lungs.
I thought, “She’s my mother and I know it’s wrong, but I won’t miss cleaning up her raving angel ooze.”
It was a long, noisy walk down the marble corridor to the nurse’s station. The nurse on duty grabbed my bribe of a box of twelve brassieres right out of my hand. They would sell or trade easily in post-Soviet Leningrad, and I wanted my mother to have special attention. I was given three boxes of brassieres and a carton of toilet tissue as salary from my last month of work at the laboratory where I had come up through the ranks and become an “engineer of aroma.” Before I was given this honorable position, I had spent many months cleaning test tubes. It was important work as well. No residue was safe from my strong action and technique. I was well schooled from my chemistry degree, and it soon became clear to my supervisor that I had done much more than just memorize every element on the periodic table.
The work of the lab was to manufacture scents, but not perfumes. Our tinctures were used when something needed to smell like what it was not. It was fascinating but strange work. For example, agents from the KGB would come to us when they needed to smell like residents from places where they were on assignment. You may not know someone from Leningrad has a different odor than someone from the Balkans or Siberia. Foreign lands as well were in our beakers and crucibles. Armenia, China, or France. We studied the eating, dressing, and lovemaking to give the agents the perfect cover, so no sniffing police dogs would discover their identity. Later on our work became top secret when the KGB needed to have a place to store dangerous chemicals and vaccines, products of military domination. The Soviet Army had their weapons, and we were to disguise them with the sweetest of aromas. Blackberry, amber, rose, and more.
Anyway, I saved some of the bras to sell in America, and the toilet tissue I left with my mother. The nurse slipped the bras under her desk and gave me an unenthusiastic nod with raised eyebrows.
“Have a pleasant journey,” she mumbled.
I walked out onto Lermontovsky Prospekt, making my way toward Nevsky, where capitalism had haphazardly taken hold. Hundreds of billboards above the buildings along the main thoroughfare broke up the sky like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Blocking my view of St. Isaac’s Cathedral was a giant woman’s hand holding a freshly brewed cup of steaming black coffee.
I remember when our city was Leningrad—before it was once again St. Petersburg, as in the time of the czars—banners of our leaders decorated the same buildings. Walking to school one day, when I was about twelve, I stopped to watch as four workers hung an enormous poster of Stalin that filled the entire side of a building near the Fontanka Canal. Prominent in the foreground was our venerable leader, Secretary General Stalin, immaculately groomed, proud in his uniform, and behind him a hydroelectric plant. His salt-and-pepper hair was brushed back off his high forehead. Thick, lustrous eyebrows accentuated that smooth and unshakable brow. His almond-shaped hazel eyes gazed in a direction slightly to the painting’s left, but more prominently out, to the future he saw for us. His perfectly tailored gray wool uniform was decorated with gold epaulets on the shoulders, red stripes on each side of the collar, and a gold star hanging from a crimson ribbon bar, pinned just above his left chest pocket that had a buttonless, double-stitched curved flap. It is a tricky piece of tailoring, if you’ve ever tried to sew.
I felt so much pride watching the poster unfurl down the side of the building; I was breathing heavily, my eyes liquid with emotion. Now that I thought of it, that image of Stalin must have brought up my first romantic feelings toward a man. My heart beat strongly under my heavy knit sweater, and through clogged nostrils I took sharp breaths as the tears streamed down my cheeks. I could not pull myself away. I wanted to live his vision. His
