It’s become fashionable in Russia these days to glance backward through a mist of rosy nostalgia, particularly at the Mature Socialism of Brezhnev.
“We stole to our heart’s content…”
“Oh, but still we were so honest, so innocent…”
“Families were closer… the ice cream more wholesome.”
From the Gucci-ed and Prada-ed to the miserably pensioned, Russians wax fondly today about lines; recall defitsit jokes; praise the flavor of the Stagnation Era kolbasa. I’m no different here in Queens. Is it not a special privilege, really, to possess such a rich, weird past? To have worn the Young Pioneer tie in that scarlet Atlantis known as the USSR? To savor such a bittersweet lode of socialist madeleines?
Then, over a couple of days in 2011, the violence of the historical reality bears down on me—really, for the first time in my adult life.
I’m sick and keeping to bed. Instead of the new Boris Akunin thriller, I have at my bedside an enormous squishy blue plastic bag Mom has lugged over from her apartment. The blue bag holds letters—two decades of correspondence from Russia from the seventies and eighties. Mom has kept it all, it turns out, crammed helter-skelter into folders, manila envelopes, shoeboxes. Despite the thirty-odd years that have passed, the USSR-issue graph paper and square envelopes with hammer-and-sickle airmail logos and sixteen-kopek stamps saying Mir (Peace) are barely frayed or yellowed. There are birthday cards with garish Soviet roses, and New Year’s greetings featuring the snowy Kremlin we were certain we’d never see again.
Sipping lemon tea, I reach in.
Razluka. The faintly folkloric Russian word for “separation” engulfs me.
This is the third new year we greet without you, my aunt Yulia’s anarchic hand protests. How long can this all last?
In the slanted scrawl and sweetly screwy old person’s grammar of my grandma Liza: litany upon litany of small daily laments to cover the existential pain of losing her daughter to exile.
Navsegda—forever. What was our emigration but death with the concession of correspondence?
But from Granddad Naum not one line in the crowded blue bag. Yulia recently told me that after Mom departed, he morally and mentally shriveled, his face a stony mask of Soviet-intelligence-worker denial. A longtime pal denounced him to the authorities, so that Naum, having escaped war bullets and Stalin’s gulags, faced arrest for his daughter’s “treason to Rodina.” He was saved by Admiral Tributs, the World War II hero. Mother found this out much later and wept.
My beloved little swallow who flew away from me…
The words are Grandmother Alla’s, a few days after we’d left her on a bench by our Moscow apartment. The biggest cache of letters is hers. Her round, emphatic script brings back her hoarse, tobacco-y laugh; as I read I can almost see her, there by her dim bedroom mirror, forcing metal hairpins into her bleached blonde bun.
Raw despair brims in her letters. A woman in her fifties who, after neglecting her son, poured all her latent maternal love onto a child who “flew away.”
My last hope has been crushed, she writes—after months of fresh pleading with the OVIR visa office have ended yet again with the denial of a visit permit. I have nothing to live for…
In November 1977, not long after Grandma Alla’s sixtieth birthday, there’s a four-page letter from my dad.
I can barely lift a pen to write about what has come to pass, he begins.
Alla had been staying over with him when she felt a terrible burning in her chest. She moaned, threw up. The ambulance took forty minutes to arrive. A haughty, very young doctor examined her. She was histrionic and the doc decided she was a hysteric—informed me so directly. He injected her with a tranquilizer and left.
The next evening Sergei found his mother facedown on the floor. This time the ambulance came fairly rapidly. But it was all over. He sat the rest of the night stroking his mother’s hair. Her face was calm and beautiful.
The autopsy showed an embolism: a piece of arterial plaque had torn off and gradually blocked the blood flow over twenty-four hours. In any other country Grandma Alla could have been saved.
Babushka loved you with total abandon, Anyuta, I read, blinking away the stabbing tears. She lived for your letters, leaping twice a day to the mailbox. She died in Brezhnev’s Moscow on a Friday. On Sunday, Dad found my last letter to her, from 4,700 untraversable miles away in Philadelphia.
There are other letters from Sergei, but not many. Barely two dozen in the thirteen years we were apart. Another memorable one dates from May 1975. My first Philadelphia spring was in full, saturated azalea bloom. When Mom came home from work, her eyes were red, and it wasn’t from hay fever. She’d opened Dad’s letter at lunch.
Lariska, dear,
For the longest time I couldn’t bring myself to write to you about “everything.”… What had happened to me is, I suppose, logical—and you yourself predicted it all back here in Moscow. I’ve realized soon enough that living alone is beyond me. The loneliness, the desire to be useful to someone (someone who, alas, is close by). In short, I’ve asked a certain Masha to live with me.
After a bit more Masha explaining, he announces: God willing, in October we will have a child, and these circumstances force me to apply for a divorce.
But apparently divorcing an émigré is extremely complicated. So would Larisa help by sending by registered mail, asap, a letter to the Soviet international court stating she has no objections?
My mother did object. She objected passionately. She’d been secretly hoping all along that Sergei would eventually join us. But being my proud, overly noble mom, she mailed the registered letter the following day.
Folded in Dad’s letter I find now a response that was never sent. It’s from a betrayed eleven-year-old—me:
Sergei. This is the last time you will hear from me. OK, you got married, but only a scumbag could write such a mean cynical letter to Mother. Then a coda in my still-shaky English. OK, gud-buye forever. PS. I dont’ have father any more. PPS. I hope your baby will be stupid and ugly.
A year after Dad’s treachery, a trickle of contact eked back between me and him—if contact applies to a very occasional letter and an annual birthday telephone call. Those static-tormented transatlantic conversations ruined the day for me. Dad sounded not entirely sober, both cocky and timid, tossing off thorny little insults. “I got the tape with you playing Brahms. Hmm, you have a long way to go.” He fancied himself a classical music critic.
By the time I was finishing high school, Grandma Liza wrote to say that Sergei had left his second family—for a much younger woman. And that Grandma had gotten a call from Masha, the scorned second wife, warning that his secret plan was “to reunite with his first family.”