“The looking glass, yes. Alice thought if a purr meant yes and a mew meant no, then at least we could have a conversation with them.”
“I always thought a purr meant ‘I am content,’ and a mew meant ‘I need.’”
“That’s the spirit, Carmela.”
“You have taught me how to enjoy your country’s drink, Stalina.”
As Carmela tipped her head back to take down the vodka, I noticed a jagged scar behind her right ear that I had never seen before.
“Carmela, what do you dream of?” I asked her.
She thought for a moment as she pulled her hair back behind her ear and covered the scar. She seemed self-conscious that I had seen it.
She said, “Juan Mendoza, I dream about him often. I left him at the bar of the Hotel Nacional in Managua. His letters stopped coming soon after I arrived here.”
“Sandinista?”
“Schoolteacher.”
“Dangerous.”
“Apparently to someone.”
“Alive?”
“I do not know. From what I could tell, it was safer for both of us not to have contact.”
“You will hear about him one day.”
“Oww! Shosta, you little…” Carmela cried out.
Shosta, the cat with the single white stripe down its face, had been watching the empty plastic cup that Carmela was spinning on her finger as she told me about Juan Mendoza. The cat could not help herself and jumped on her lap, batted the cup, and scratched her wrist in the process. The disruption brought me a shock of sobriety. My head spun as I sat up.
“Wash your hand, Carmela.”
“I have some alcohol in the office.”
“We have alcohol right here. Mendeleev’s original.”
“You finish your bath, Stalina. I need to go back to the desk anyway. It’s only a scratch.”
The two cats sit side by side cleaning their paws, oblivious to the disruption. “Leave the cats here, Carmela. I’ll take them back to the linen room when I finish.”
“Very well, Stalina.”
As she opens the door, the cats turn to see the outside. The wind has picked up, and on the gust that came through the door, the comforting smell of pine trees—like in Russia—comes into the room. Carmela closes the door with some trouble against the wind. Damn sticking door, the whole room shakes when it closes.
Under the water I slip. Submerged, face up, eyes open. The bubbles have spread. The surface looks solid like ice the color of a stream in winter. A soft blue green. I can hold my breath under water for a long time. I learned from my mother, who had great lung capacity from years of water ballet team. Looking up through the water and bubbles it’s like seeing Petersburg through a window on a snowy day. In winter when it snowed the city would be a bit warmer, and steam would rise from the streets. The city with its frozen waterways welcomed the floating, drifting snow. The steam off the street was breaths between hardened pedestrians ducking into metro stops, tea stalls, and museums for relief. On days like these I would wander to my favorite place in Petersburg, the Museum of the Arctic. In the former Church of St. Nicholas, right around the corner from Dostoyevsky’s house. St. Nicholas! Santa Claus! In the Arctic! Oh, Russians are clever. As you enter the museum, suspended overhead is the plane that Soviet pilot and hero Valery Chkalov flew from Moscow to America via the North Pole. Standing below the plane was like being a scientist at a remote site waiting for the arrival of monthly supplies. Sometimes here at the Liberty I feel like a fact-finder dumped in a faraway land, researching the human condition as it relates to the need for companionship. My research has become these “Rooms for the Imaginative.” Someday I will make a scientific study based on the popularity and longevity of the short-stay phenomenon. Why not? Once a scientist always a scientist.
The Museum of the Arctic has in its collection the head of a woolly mammoth. The first time I touched his ancient, hairy brow, I felt pity for him and his earthly demise. Lost in the cold, frozen to death, despite his long, warm coat. After paying my respects to the mammoth, I would go upstairs to visit the sculptures of indigenous peoples. These people were the ones, it seems, who invented the original “dildo.” Not from green rubber, but out of bone and walrus tusks, they made some goodly sized facsimiles. I wonder how the school groups discuss the relevance of such objects in the native cultures. I could start my own museum at the Liberty Motel.
I was often the only person visiting the museum on these days. The quiet and solitude gave me time to imagine the faraway places I wanted to know and a life outside of Russia. Not something I talked to many people about. As I would make my way upstairs, the museum minder—an old woman who recognized me from my frequent visits and knew I loved the museum almost as much as she did—would turn off the lights on the other floors to conserve the electricity. With the lights still off, she would guide me back downstairs with a flashlight and bring me to a favorite diorama. The old lady would flick the switch below a glass display window. Slowly the lights would start to shimmer and glow, and the miniature scene of a lone Arctic research station and its single bare bulb in the window burning in the long winter night would be just a shadow under the moving colors and iridescent shimmering haze. I would stand and stare, and the old woman would watch with me and laugh a little as she whispered, “Aurora borealis, aurora borealis.” And I would say, “
Out from under the water, my breath restored, memory intact and fingers wrinkled like the mammoth’s brow. The Liberty Motel is my museum! My rooms are a singular collection, the history of fantasies of pleasure, all preserved and frozen in time. The guests bring life to the exhibits, and I am honored to be the minder.
To my dear family and friends, who will inhabit me forever, I bring you along with me, for it is you that keep the swing in my ever-shifting hips and inspire me to provide a place for happiness, recovery, and when needed, a dose of revenge.
I’ll finish up here and count the dollars we brought in and look to see who signed the register tonight. Mark Twain, Alfred Smith, Leo Tolstoy, Harry and Joanie to be sure.
Good night.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the students in my “Oral History” class at Touro College in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn for sharing their life stories, which inspired the writing of this novel.
Thanks to the Summer Literary Seminar for the opportunity to visit and write in Russia.
To my friends, too many to name here, who helped me get to Russia because they knew it was important.
To Terry Goodman of AmazonEncore whose phone call about publishing this book was like winning the lottery.
Special thanks to Linda Rosenberg for her insightful editing and for meeting me on train platforms to hand off her weekly notes.
To Les Baum for sharing everything with me and for those encouraging nudges to keep writing.
