“Dear Compatriots!” The phrase no longer included us.
PART IV
RETURNS
CHAPTER EIGHT
1980s: MOSCOW THROUGH THE SHOT GLASS
At the start of the eighties, less than a decade into our American exile, I went to a gadalka, a fortune-teller.
Trudging up to her fifth-floor lair in New York’s Little Italy, I murmured curses at every landing. This gadalka, Terri by name, charged a whopping ninety bucks for her readings—and I didn’t even trust fortune-tellers. But an attack of professional angst had driven me there.
“I hear music.”
The gadalka Terri announced this on her threshold in a thick Italian New Yorkese.
I stared at her, panting and amazed. My angst involved my piano studies at Juilliard. How’d she know I was a musician?
But from here the reading went nowhere. Terri, in her thirties, sipped tea from a chipped I Heart NY mug, squinted and strained, conjured trivialities.
“Your cousin doesn’t love her husband… In your mama’s life there’s a person named Bennett…” I nodded along. I felt the ninety bucks evaporating in my pocket.
Then came her big finale. “Soon,” exclaimed Terri, waving her tea mug, “soon you’ll see your papa and the rest of your family!”
I handed over the cash and tramped back downstairs fuming, my angst unaddressed, my real question—Will I become a famous pianist?—unanswered. Outside I went and consoled myself with a jumbo cannoli.
My mother had by then followed me from Philadelphia to New York, where we shared a one-bedroom on a drab street in the mostly Colombian enclave of Jackson Heights, Queens. But still. After the doldrums of Philadelphia, immigrant multiculti New York felt like home. I loved how our hallway smelled of garlicky pernil and stewed beans. Salsa and cumbia blasted from every apartment, while our own was filled with the lofty, competing sounds of Beethoven and Brahms. Despite my career angst, generally, life was okay. Mom taught ESL at a nearby elementary school, and what’s more, she’d rekindled her Moscow lifestyle of concerts, theaters, and endless ticket lines. She was even happier seeing me worship at the altar of High Culture. Ever since I at thirteen had begun taking the train up from Philly to attend Julliard’s pre-college program—and then the college proper in 1980—I’d lived and breathed piano. The keyboard completely took over my life, sustained me through years of immigrant dislocation, repaired my fractured identity.
“So? What did the gadalka say about your piano?” Mom wanted to know. I shrugged. I asked if she knew anybody named “Bennett.” Mom nearly fell out of her chair.
“Mrs. Bennett? She’s our Board of Education comptroller—I just saw her today!”
Amid the Bennett hue and cry I almost forgot Terri’s last bit about our family reuniting. Mom slackened to a wistful smile when I remembered. It was her turn to shrug. Oh well… The Soviet State was eternal, intractable. Reunions just weren’t in the cards.
And then they all began dropping dead.
In the Russian vernacular the early eighties are known as the “pompous funeral era.” Or “the three-coffin Five-Year Plan.”
“Got your funeral pass?” went a Kremlin guard joke.
“Nah,” replies the attendee. “Got a season ticket.”
Most of the doddering Politburo were pushing seventy. The death of Alexei Kosygin, the sometime reformer, kicked off the decade. Dear Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev followed on November 10, 1982, three days after he’d been seen looking his usual self—a fossilized turtle—at the sixty-fifth anniversary of the revolution parade.
On Leonid Ilyich’s death day, Soviet TV turned true to form—mysteriously weird. A droopy Tchaikovsky symphony instead of a much-anticipated hockey match? A didactic Lenin flick in place of the Militia Day pop concert?
The following morning, “with great sorrow,” the Kremlin announced the passing of the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee and chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet.
Nobody wailed.
Dear Leonid Ilyich, seventy-five, was neither feared nor loved. In the last of his almost twenty years ruling the 270-million-person socialist empire, he was a decrepit pill-popper who washed his sedatives down with zubrovka, a vodka flavored with buffalo grass. He’d survived strokes, a clinical death, and a jaw cancer that made mush out of his five-hour-long speeches. He still gave them—often. His rezhim clanked along, just as sclerotic as he, resuscitated somewhat by hard currency from soaring oil and gas prices.
This domino player had a nice life for himself. His cartoonish extravagance held a perfect mirror to the kitsch materialist epoch he led. Brezhnev adored foreign cars and bespoke jackets of capitalist denim. Right before dying he indulged in his favorite sport, killing boar at the Zavidovo hunting estate, where choice prey were brought in from all over the USSR and fattened on fish and oranges. The Politburo hunting party fattened itself on caviar straight out of sturgeons, steaming crayfish soup, and spit-roasted boar au plein air. It was an age of crony banquets and hyperelite food allocations, and Dear Leonid Ilyich was the empire’s first epicure, with a habit of sending culinary souvenirs—a pheasant, a rabbit, a bloody hunk of bear—to favored friends. By many accounts he was a harmless, fun-loving man. Too bad about the Prague Spring, the torture of dissidents in psychiatric wards, the war in Afghanistan.
Above all Brezhnev loved baubles—which presented a peculiar funeral problem. Protocol required each medal to be borne behind the casket on its own velvet cushion. But Dear Leonid Ilyich had amassed more then two hundred awards, including a Lenin Prize for Literature for a fabricated ghostwritten autobiography. Even with several medals per cushion, the award-bearing cortège consisted of forty-four men.
Mom and I during all this sat glued to our TV in New York. But any wild flicker of hope from the gadalka Terri’s prediction died when they announced the successor.
Yuri Andropov, the ex-KGB chief, a hunter of dissidents, was definitely not a nice man.
But though his heart was hard, Andropov’s kidneys barely functioned. Thirteen months later men in shiny mink hats once again followed a coffin out of the mint-green and white Hall of Columns to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march.
Andropov’s successor’s health was summed up by another joke: “Without regaining consciousness, Comrade Konstantin Chernenko assumed the post of general secretary.” He lasted just over three hundred days.
“Dear Comrades,” went a mock news announcement, “don’t laugh, but once again with great sorrow we inform you…”
In March 1985 a barely known agricultural secretary who had been Andropov’s protégé became the Soviet Union’s newest leader. Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was only fifty-four, vigorous, with functioning organs, a law degree from Moscow State University, a thick southern Russian accent, a pushy wife, and an emphatic manner that instantly seduced the Western media. Initially Russians didn’t joke too much about the South America–shaped blotch on his bald scalp. The venom came later. Gorbachev was the sixth—and last—general secretary of the country known as the USSR.