“Fine, fine,” I tell her. “Why not?”
“Really?” she says, her bloodshot eyes lighting up in genuine surprise. “I thought it would take a bit more convincing.”
“Let’s get on with it.”
She is startled once more, caressing the limp strands on her daughter’s head. “Right now?”
“I don’t have forever.”
“All right then,” she says.
She puts a finger to her lips and tells me to wait a second, she has to figure out how to record the call, if that’s all right with me. Then she pats her girl’s butt, and the helpless thing shuts her unknowable eyes, a creature as alien to me as a space monkey, as far away from my Kiev kitchen as a distant planet, an American-born girl whose parents left their homeland as schoolchildren and will hardly be able to pass their Soviet legacy down to her, though they did surprise me by naming her Natalia after my mother, and now Natasha seems to think the girl will one day feel tied to her mother’s Motherland from hearing my sad story. Currently, the only Soviet thing about the child is that with the cosmically disappointed look on her face, she brings to mind Gorbachev during his resignation announcement. Well, what else is there for me to do? I wait for my pathetic little great-granddaughter to settle, and then I begin.
My grandmother Tonya was a weak, spoiled woman, though I must admit she had a rather difficult life. She came of age at the turn of the century, in a palatial apartment in the center of Kiev, a buxom and brainless banker’s daughter, wasting her youth flitting about endless soirees draped in the season’s finest gowns, smoking long cigarettes and flirting with any man with two eyes like the frivolous woman that she was. She married a banker, a colleague of her father’s, and gave him three children: first horse-faced Aunt Shura, then my dear father, and finally my sweet Uncle Pasha.
But when my father turned twelve, the Revolution blazed through Ukraine like a flame through a silk handkerchief. The Bolsheviks seized my grandparents’ fine apartment overlooking the Khreschatyk, inheriting all the velvet curtains and blinding chandeliers my grandmother spoke of until her dying day. They left her family with two trunks of finery they dragged to their temporary home at the residence of the Dimitrev brothers, friends of the family whose ties to Lenin made them immune to the upheaval, whose apartment overlooked Postal Square and had four floors and gilded windows and a separate entrance just for carriages. My grandparents decided to flee Ukraine before they suffered the worst of it—I am not certain where to, perhaps London, or Milan, or even Paris. They planned to take a train to Odessa and transfer to a more enlightened capital from there.
But as they plotted their escape, my grandfather died of typhus, you know how these things go. And so, the day before my grandmother and her three children were to leave, stern typhus husband still tepid in the ground, the older Dimitrev brother pulled her aside with a double marriage proposaclass="underline" she could marry him, and her daughter, Shura, could marry his younger brother. What did she think? She was not a product of the first freshness, but she still had her youth about her, she was not yet forty, and her daughter was a spirited sixteen, and they could have a good life together, and furthermore, it was unpatriotic to leave the Motherland when it needed you most. Could she really see herself raising her children in some dainty land like France, or among the blanched Brits, with their tasteless food and inferior literature?
But after some hesitation, Baba Tonya turned down Dimitrev senior, got her children and suitcases ready, and had her hosts’ carriage drop them off at the train station. Can you imagine it? Utter chaos. Blood running through the streets. People swarming around like flies on a heap of manure, trying to keep their wits about them as they prepared to face the great unknown. My grandmother hovering over her children like a hapless mother duckling, wondering if her destination would prove more bountiful than her Motherland, home of her ancestors, the Kiev Rus, land of Gogol, cradle of Russian civilization. Or would it be even worse—was she walking her diminished self and her three children into more dire circumstances, which she would have to navigate without a man by her side?
My grandmother was no heroine. She was no Catherine the Great, riding her horses and taking her lovers and corresponding with Voltaire and changing the world with the force of her fist and tremendous cleavage. The thought of emptying her own chamber pot brought her to tears. She had a large, substantial frame, but she was as wobbly as a holodets. She liked her dances, powder on her face, Champagne at her bedside, a maid to clean up after her thoughtless messes. She heard the train moan like a whale in heat and turned her children around and jumped into the nearest carriage she could find. And so she fell into the arms of Dimitrev senior and accepted the brothers’ dual marriage proposal. Who could blame her?
Of course, if she could look back on her choice from the vantage point of history, she would see she made an awful mistake, but there was no way to know that at the time. And with senior and junior Dimitrev, Babushka Tonya was able to maintain her lavish lifestyle—to a point. Shortly after the rushed nuptials, the upstairs of the brothers’ apartment was seized and divided up for the so-called proletariat, and suddenly, there was no more room for my twelve-year-old father or his nine-year-old brother, or so the story goes. Dimitrev senior decided to shuttle the boys off to an orphanage all the way out in Kharkov, can you believe it? And my grandmother did nothing to stop him.
The way my dear father told it, the establishment was quite dignified, for an orphanage. He and his brother shared a bunk bed with warm blankets and had enough porridge to eat. The place was run by a distant Dimitrev cousin, so the boys were given special privileges, and my father became an aide to the teachers, helping care for the younger children, never shedding a tear, reading every book on the institution’s modest shelves until he ruined his eyesight and was forced to wear bottle-cap glasses. He even maintained his composure on the rare days when his mother would summon him and his brother to Kiev for a visit. They had shined their boots so hard in preparation for their first reunion that Uncle Pasha immediately slipped on the parquet floor at the entrance to the apartment, breaking his nose and dripping blood all over the place, and though a doctor was sent, his nose was never the same afterward. Perhaps that was why his grudge toward his mother was more severe than my father’s.
When my father turned sixteen, he returned to Kiev to attend the Polytechnic Institute, while his brother chose to stay behind at the orphanage instead of joining him in the ancestral city. My father had left the orphanage in what, 1922, 1923? The Bolsheviks had run everything to the ground, but my father had managed to stay out of trouble. Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, my dear mother, who had been truly orphaned due to a parental cocktail of typhus-cancer at the age of seven, had been slaving away at the restaurant of two mean old aunts ever since, spending her days washing dishes and occasionally wringing the necks of the chickens they kept in the backyard for stew, learning everything from the books she snuck into the closet where she slept. She taught herself to read and write by closet candlelight, well enough to finish school and eventually become a secretary at the Polytechnic Institute, and that was where she met my father.
They married in 1924 and in 1927 I was born. A year later came Polya, my smelly, spoiled, and achingly gorgeous sister. Papa had done quite well as an engineer at that point, having dug himself out from the horse-stink of the orphanage to the upper echelon of the Industrial Engineering Institute, even becoming the closest friend and confidant of Konstantin Orlov himself, Institute founder and leading expert of Soviet welding, the sneaky fire-breathing business of fusing metal without the pesky need for nuts and bolts. He was a stony man whose only redeeming quality was his handsome son, Misha. My father, however, maintained his humility in spite of his lofty connections. Though Uncle Konstantin offered our family a private apartment in the blocks designated for Institute employees, Papa chose to live among the masses, and my equally austere mother supported him wholeheartedly. He recalled how helpless his mother had been because of all her maids and bedrooms and parquet floors and did not want his daughters to be similarly weak, so he condemned my dear family, the Volkov clan, to a one-room communalka on Vladimirskaya, only a few blocks from his workplace, while Baba Tonya and Aunt Shura continued to enjoy their finery near the bank of the Dnieper.