“Tell him about St Saviour,” said another girl on the bus, and Kim told me about the beautiful cathedral, most beautiful in the world, she said, that had been a swimming pool, and which had been restored so beautifully, so much gold, she said.
I said, to make them talk more, fill me in on this new Moscow-it was seventeen years since I’d been back-and that I admired Russian culture very much. They asked me what I did exactly. I said I was doing research for my new book and also on vacation, and hoped my answer would be good enough, but they were observant kids.
“But you are doing what? In your real life?” asked Kim.
My real life?
Again, I said I was a travel writer, and I wrote books and an online blog about foreign places. They told me the best writers were in Russia, and then one of them offered me a candy bar, explaining Red October produced delicious chocolates, Russian chocolates.
She held out an Alionka bar. On the wrapper was the familiar picture of a rosy-cheeked little girl in a baby babushka, the tiny headscarf tied under her chin.
I unwrapped it slowly. The smell rose up. The same smell of the same chocolate my father had brought home for me every week in his leather briefcase, and now the girls on the bus said: taste it.
Breaking off a piece, I ate it, pretended it was a delightful new treat, something I’d never tasted, and the girls all said, eat some more, eat it all, we have enough, come on, as if it were a competition, a way to rate me, and I bit into the chocolate again, nodding and smiling for their benefit. When I looked out of the window, I saw my 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.