“So… you missed Rodina?”
I detect a familiar sarcasm in the way he says Rodina, but I muster my best American smile and nod earnestly, realizing as I do that everything I’ve missed will probably have vanished. The loss of the imaginary Rodina. Was that what terrified me in the snow on the way to the terminal?
From the baggage area through the glass pane, a distant heaving wall of greeters waves, gesticulates.
“Papa!” Mom shrieks.
“Dedushka Naum? Where… where?”
And then I spot them—Granddad’s thick dark glass frames peering above a bouquet of mangy red carnations.
Wild with excitement, Mom is now waving frantically to her brother and sister. Standing next to them, also waving, is a man with a mane of gray hair and vaguely familiar features.
Something more familiar comes looming along the baggage carousel. They have arrived with us—our four epic duffel bags, with the Georgian’s IBM carton trailing behind. Each bag sports a neat slash near the zipper.
“The salami…” murmurs Mom.
In the frenzy of hugging, crying, touching, I finally recognize the man with the thick gray hair. It’s my father. But not the father I’d imagined from across the Atlantic—a romantically nihilist Alain Delon look-alike who abandoned us with cruel matter-of-factness.
The man now kissing me awkwardly is heavy and old, with polyester brown pants, shabby, square shoes with thick rubber soles, and a collapsed, sunken jaw.
This is Sergei, my father, I’m thinking. And he has no teeth.
“The salami, they stole our salami!” Mom keeps repeating, laughing madly, to Sashka, my gimpy uncle who wears a spiffy, furry karakul cap and seems jarringly, uncharacteristically sober.
“Chudo, chudo—miracle, miracle.” My aunt Yulia is wiping tears onto my raccoon coat.
Glancing sideways at Dad’s toothless mouth, I realize this: I have forgiven him everything.
The anguished nights back in Davydkovo with Mom, waiting for his key to turn in the lock, the divorce letter, the horrible birthday calls. Because while Mom and I have prospered, even flourished, my father’s life and his looks have been decaying. And I’m pretty sure this is true about Rodina generally.
A triumphant mini-armada of two Lada cars delivered us to our former apartment in Davydkovo. The squat USSR-issue Fiats, resembling soap dishes on wheels, proudly bore our epic duffel bags on their roofs. Their socialist trunks weren’t designed for ninety-nine-cent U.S. abundance.
“The rich, they have their own ways…” snorted the pimply traffic cop who stopped us to extract the usual bribe.
The forty-meter khrushcheba apartment where Liza and the entire family tearfully awaited wasn’t designed for our epic duffel bags either. Especially since my grandparents had invited two elephantine Odessa relatives to stay with them while we visited.
And then we were there, thirteen years after our farewell dinner, back around Liza’s laden table.
Nobody missed our eight stolen batons of New York salami. We didn’t realize this at the time, but 1987 was virtually the farewell year for the zakaz, the elite take-home food package Granddad still enjoyed, thanks to his naval achievements. Very soon the zakaz would vanish forever, along with most any sort of edible and, eventually, the USSR itself. I could still kick myself for not making a photo documentation of Babushka Liza’s table. It was straight out of the 1952 Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. There were the vile, prestige cod liver conserves under gratings of hard-boiled eggs, the buttery smoked sturgeon balik, the Party-favored tongue, the inescapable tinned saira fish in tomato sauce—all arrayed on Stalinist baroque cut-crystalware my grandparents had scored as fiftieth wedding anniversary gifts.
“Black bread!” Mother kept squealing. “How I missed our black bread.” She squealed too about the sushki (dried mini-bagels), the zefir (pink rococo marshmallows), and the prianiki (gingerbread). That night, through my fitful sleep as we all bivouacked on cots in my grandparent’s boxy living room, I heard the fizz of Mom’s Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolving in water, drowned out by the droning legal soap operas of her deaf aunt Judge Tamara, up from Odessa.
“Chudo, chudo, chudo—miracle miracle.” Relatives tugged on our sleeves, as though we might be a mirage. Grandpa Naum was the happiest customer of all. His smile was wide, his tense intelligence worker’s frown smoothed—as if thirteen years of shame and fear and moral dilemmas had magically slid away. His dogged loyalty to whatever regime was in power had paid off. All was ending well. The omniwise Gorbachevian State had magnanimously forgiven us prodigal traitors to Rodina. It was now fine even to openly condemn Stalinist crimes, a sentiment Granddad had bottled up for over three decades.
“If only Gorbachev would restore the navy to its former glory” was his one lament.
“Let’s thank the Party,” he thunderingly toasted, “for bringing our girls back to our Rodina!”
“Fuck the Party!” shrieked the young glasnost generation.
“Fuck Rodina!” the entire family chimed in unison.
Our Moscow fortnight passed in a blur. Never in our lives have we felt so desired and loved, been kissed so hard, listened to with such wild curiosity.
A demonic hospitality possessed Mom to invite people she barely knew to visit us in America. Because now they could.
“I’ll send you a visa, stay with us a month, we’ll show you our New York!”
I kept pinching her under the table. Our New York was a small one-bedroom in Queens that Mom and I shared with my antique Steinway grand and my six-foot-three boyfriend, a haughty British poststructuralist.
“That first visit,” Aunt Yulia confided recently, “we found you so adorable, so American in your fancy fur coats. And more than a little demented!” She giggled. “How you loved everything about our shabby, shithole Rodina! Perhaps because of the snow?”
True. A fairy-tale white had camouflaged all the sores and socialist decay. To our now-foreign eyes Moscow appeared as a magical Orientalist cityscape, untainted by garish capitalist neon and billboards. Even my mother the Rodina-basher found herself smitten. With everything.
The store signs: RYBA. MYASO. MOLOKO. (Fish. Meat. Milk.) These captions formerly signifying nothing but empty Soviet shelves and unbearable lines were now to Mom masterpieces of neo-Constructivist graphic design. The metro stops—those teeming mosaic and marble terrors of her childhood, now stood revealed as shining monuments of twenty-four-karat totalitarian kitsch. Even the scowling pirozhki sales dames berating their customers were enacting a uniquely Soviet linguistic performance.
Mom for her part very politely inquired what coins one might use for the pay phones.
Grazhdanka, she was snarled at. “Citizen, you just fell from Mars?” Me in my vintage raccoon coat? I was branded as chuchelo, a scarecrow, a raggedy bum.
In retrospect 1987 was an excellent year to visit. Everything had changed. And yet it hadn’t. A phone call still cost two kopeks, and a three-kopek brass coin bought you soda with thick yellow syrup from the clunky gazirovka (soda) machine outside the maroon-hued, star-shaped Arbat metro station. Triangular milk cartons still jumbled and jabbed in avoska bags; Lenin’s bronze outstretched arm still pointed forward—often to Dumpsters and hospitals—with the slogan YOU’RE ON THE RIGHT PATH, COMRADE!