revealed so openly (but then how can you have secrets from Daddy?) and, on the other, a kind of searing vulnerability, a wary uncertainty—a feeling that would reappear at the loss of virginity (which she only manages after Daddy’s death), and then every time after that, the same eternal sense of daughterly duty, ultimate feminine submission from which men, not having a clue of its source, would necessarily go wild (“You’re such a good fuck!”) and then she would leave them. Break loose, that’s all she wanted to do, break loose—all elbows from spontaneous adolescent growth, pimply teenager in tears at her own awkwardness, one pair of panty hose speckled with brown knots where she tried to sew up the runs, and one dress, the school uniform worn lily-white at the elbows. She went to school dances religiously—every Friday without fail, like a Moslem to the mosque!—in a borrowed blouse and too-short skirt from her Pioneer Girl days (white top, black bottom), consuming herself with bitter envy at the sight of her classmates in all-grown-up clothes, with grown-up haircuts done at the stylist’s, in full bloom like the proverbial cherry orchard, glistening in high-gloss lipstick and black Lancôme butterfly lashes—ten roubles was what that blue tube of mascara cost, and Mother’s monthly paycheck, on which the three of them lived, came out to 150 roubles, so what was there to do but steal it, in the coatroom, from a briefcase thoughtlessly left open by a beauty queen from the senior class—true, it was a pretty cheap tube, from Poland, half used up, or so she consoled herself, and not such a great loss for the beauty queen, but nonetheless there it was, nineteenth century, the classic Jean Valjean loaf of bread and Cosette staring at the doll-store window: shame, fear, a secret, both despicable and exciting, like her exhibitionist exercises alone in front of the mirror. She applied makeup badly in the school bathroom, painting crooked lines under her eyes, and after the dance she would fiercely scrub the mascara from her red eyelids: it was frightening to think what would happen if Daddy saw—Daddy, who was always so afraid for her, who ran around collecting dossiers on each of her girlfriends: they were all spoiled, smoked, and kissed boys, Daddy screamed, face turning beet-red and she, you have to hand it to her, screamed just as loud in return, and then sobbed in the bathroom—especially after that memorable evening when he slapped her face right out on the street, at the trolley stop, because she had taken off somewhere and he decided that she was running away from him—but she came back, because there was nowhere to run to, and he, not saying a word, slapped her as hard as he could across the face. Of course, later there were hugs-and-kisses, forgiveness-begging and the like, “my baby,” “my golden girl,” all this after several red-hot hours of pandemonium, wailing, sobbing, slamming of doors, accompanied by the shuffle of Mother’s feeble attempts to intervene—because Mother was quite beside the point in all this, Mother was, in fact, frigid, and obviously out of it, a black windowpane deflecting all light (later on, one morning in the early months of your marriage, she would poke her head into your bedroom with an alarm clock ringing merrily in her hands: wakey, wakey, breakfast is ready!—precisely at the moment—and after the ensuing explosive scene she would weep like an orphan in the kitchen, frightened and helpless: she was just trying her best!—so that in the end you, having calmed yourself and shaken the rest of the shivers from your startled body, would be apologizing and cheering her up). And what else could she have been if not frigid, a child-survivor of the Famine (a three-year-old in 1933, she stopped walking, while Grandmother made her way to Moscow in freight cars, switching from train to train, in order to exchange her dowry—two thick strands of Mediterranean pearls—for two bags of dry bread). A child nourished on single stalks of wheat stolen from the field, for which the collective farm guard, catching her once, cut her across the face with a whip—you can still see a thin white thread of a scar even now—and it was lucky to have ended with that, because her father, your grandfather, that is, was already up in the Arctic panning gold in a slave-gang, and about fifteen years later your father, her future husband, would be up there doing the same. And as for her, she made out okay, she got over the stolen ears of wheat and finally got enough to eat, twenty years or so later once she graduated from university and found a job—and American Sovietologists still can’t figure out why there are so many fat, shapeless women in this generation, they read Fromm and Jung up and down and between the lines—Eat, that’s what these babes wanted to do when they hit twenty—eat, that’s all!—stuff their faces with meager bread rations in student dorms, both hands, picking up crumbs, what a clitoris was they never did get to find out (it hit you for the first time standing in line at a pharmacy: they had brought in some menstrual pads, and a queue made up entirely of young women was busily stuffing shopping bags—the grannies, meantime, walked up shyly: “Girls, what’s in those packages?”—“They’re women’s packages, for women!” the girls snarled back: not for the likes of you, in other words—and the grannies stared back blankly, not understanding). So Mother was as innocent as a lamb, or rather the Virgin Mary (there really was something Madonna-like about her in those photos from the late fifties—the time when they all finally did get enough to eat—she glowed with such gentle innocence, a girl in curls, you couldn’t take your eyes off her!—delicate long face with a slim tapered nose—a now lost, quiet kind of beauty illuminated by an inner smile, the Cossack Baroque portrait three hundred years later: Roxolana, Varvara Apostol, Varvara Langyshivna—yup, those were the days, now gone for sure! You still get to see the full-faced, embroidered, fresh-off-the-farm-let’s-go-dance-in-the-cherry-orchard variety, but not the true Cossack ladies, forget about those! And even your own good looks are already by two exponents coarser, more vulgar—let’s not forget to make that were). And so Mother, gentle songbird, sacrificial lamb, slaved over her dissertation in a Khrushchev communal housing project, while in the kitchen her neighbor, a cook from the local working-class diner—one of those that Lenin had ordained to rule the state—(single mother of five from five different men), threw rags and teeth into Mother’s borsch (baby teeth belonging to one of the progeny, perhaps?). But Mother did finish her dissertation in poetics despite it all, right in time for 1973, when as the spouse of an “unreliable” she was booted the hell out of grad school, so that the day of your dissertation defense (which you needed like a hole in the head) was in fact her day, she was as happy as a child: “Ah, if only your father were alive to see this!”—and how in God’s name, by what means was he supposed to have stayed alive, pitched to the very bottom of the well but catching hold of a beam on the way down in a spasmodic grip and clinging desperately (anything but back to the prison camp), buried alive in four walls, listening to the radio, blowing cigarette smoke out of the tiny pilot window and watching with horror as the only woman of his life, his own flesh and blood, irrevocably slipped away, pushing out through the trap door, propelled by the sheer force of natural growth: “Lift up your nightie, I want to see how you’ve been growing” (and would it not be the same kind of both concerned and authoritative intonation twenty years later—“Turn around, I want to take you from behind now”—that would awaken in you that long-forgotten feeling of home?)—and it won’t matter that you never liked it from behind, it won’t matter that at first you refused to lift up your nightie, flushed with an un-childlike feeling of insult—only to hear in response a quiet and unfamiliarly moist, deeply-felt “my child, it’s me, your Daddy!”—in the end result of which the nightie did indeed go up (what else could you do?)—that anxious, obscene feeling of exposure, the first experience, far stronger than any of that knee-touching under the classroom desk—and yet you yearned to break free, God how you yearned to break free—like a condemned soul from under the executioner’s axe, but—where? To your teenage friends, any dance in sight, rock bands, football games, and the first groping of body parts in the darkness of the school gym—what a joke! You couldn’t even tell any of them how in the third year