especially an oldie like me, to leave. The customs inspector handed back my passport and made a slow, deliberate stroke with his forefinger along the top of my hand. I took my bag and smiled out of relief at passing the inspection. As I walked through the gate, I felt his stare on my heavily padded behind swinging from side to side like a cushion-covered pendulum.
I did not sleep and mostly cried during the twelve-hour flight to America. The clouds surrounded us like steam at my local banya. Instead of glistening bodies revealed in the breaks of heavy mist, I saw a landscape of clouds and ice-capped mountains as we crossed over Finland and then Greenland, where the sun’s light was tippling off the waves of the Atlantic. When we lost the sun and the moon rose, the dark waters looked like scores of crystal chandeliers lighting our way. The sun had come up when we left Petersburg, and I saw it rise again as we passed over an island the stewardess called Prince Edward. While in the air, I sorted through memories and divided them like the test tubes I once cleaned in the lab. Long, short, cracked, hard to see through, lined with residue, all dropped into the washbasin of my brain, bobbing to the surface when a path was made clear, or simply pulled up from below with a snap of my rubber-gloved hand.
Seeing a glimpse of the ocean’s waves through the clouds made me think of how I used to swim in the Gulf of Finland with my mother just a few years before I left Russia. The doctors said it was the best therapy for her dementia.
“The cold water will awaken the senses and stimulate the organs. Her blood will flow more readily. It’s all about blood flow,” they would say.
My mother had been a member of a water ballet collective in her youth and consequently swam beautifully. I loved to watch her swim and tried to imitate her curved arms and the precise entry of her fingertips into the water. On one of our regular Sunday swims, a family secret was revealed.
That day Mother came up for air after a long time underwater and announced, “Swimming makes me think of Maxim.”
Maxim was my uncle.
She continued, “Maxim kissed me underwater.”
I thought she was confused. “Don’t you mean Father kissed you?”
“No! Kisses were from Maxim. We kissed so long we had no air; he emptied the last drop of air into my lungs.”
“You almost drowned?”
“We bobbed to the surface, and I breathed the air back into his lungs.”
“What about Father?”
My mother replied, “Your father let me have the pleasure I did not have with him.”
“With his brother?”
“He’s not your uncle.” She was annoyed as if I should have known.
As we both treaded water, a seagull landed near us. The bird screeched at a piece of sodden bread floating by and grabbed it in his beak. Another bird swooped down and stole it out of his mouth. The first gull did not pursue his foe. Instead, he floated past us and let out a feeble screech to no one in particular.
“How spineless,” I thought. That gull reminded me of my father, who would stay home writing and drinking when my mother and Maxim would go out together. After a couple of years, he was only drinking and never wrote anything new. He would obsessively read and reread his published poems and essays, pacing up and down our room holding the book or journal in front of him and taking a pen from behind his ear to make the changes. He wrote about vodka as a metaphor for oppressive government. Many of his poems were in English. His supporters would learn them and deliver his words through the underground to publishers outside Russia. I memorized all his poems. This was a typical practice to save the writings of our country’s poets. On paper their work could easily be lost, destroyed, or sent to the authorities. Like this one:
He inspired other writers to write what was on their minds, while he became more and more crippled by the loss of freedom for words and humor. It was to him the height of cruelty. At the end of the night, the liquor would be gone and the pages were unintelligible.
After going through some unexpected turbulence, the plane landed safely in New York City on September 30, 1991. That was when my strange new life began.
Chapter Four: Port Authori-TAY
Kennedy Airport is all about moving things. Airplanes, luggage, people, money, coffee, donuts. Bleary-eyed and swollen from the trip, I welcomed the moving sidewalk and slowly drifted forward. The people who walked along the outside concrete sidewalk were faster than the motorized one. With some relief to my swollen ankles, I moved closer to the real America. People stood along the corridors waiting and straining to see all the arriving passengers. A man clutched a photograph in one hand and a straw hat in the other. A family of six, everyone exactly the same height and not very tall, bobbed up and down in a huddle like a pack of prairie dogs. At the luggage transport, I spotted the double straps of my satchel rounding the curve and pushed through the crowd to grab the worn leather handles. A line formed for customs. Soon it was my turn. The officer did not flirt with me this time, but he did look me straight in the eye.
“Are you here on business or pleasure?” he asked.
“I’m here for good.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“To stay.”
“Good for you, business or pleasure?” He was all business and a bit annoyed.
“I hope pleasure.”
“OK, pleasure it will be. Step back, please.”
As he opened my bag, I could smell the thick, damp air from the plaster walls of my Petersburg apartment in the liberated molecules. The customs officer did not appear to notice. The name on the tag on his pocket read Sgt. Green. In Russian green is
He opened my photo album and turned it over. A dried bouquet fell out from between the pages. Oh, Trofim. He had given me the flowers with the lab coat at my graduation in Vilnius. He was my professor of physics and chemistry. He was brilliant in both, ran the Young Scientists Club, and was asked to make a speech at the graduation ceremony. Everyone envied my position as his assistant. We spent a lot of time side by side over experiments, but never touched. When his job ended in Vilnius, he was sent to the State University of Leningrad. I was returning home after my studies and was thrilled he would be there. When his family did not follow him to Leningrad for several months, we could not help ourselves.
