The list of subjects to which my mother could apply her famous silence was bounded by neither taste nor logic. I could understand her not wanting to elucidate on her years in the labor camp. But later, in the seventies, I almost never heard her speak about our family in America, though we were regularly in receipt of packages filled with sweaters, denim Levi’s, instant coffee, and sneakers. And still later, in Brooklyn, she refused to let me change the name tag on the intercom in the vestibule of her Section 8. For the next eight years, I would buzz myself up to the flat of one deceased “Marquita Mu?iz.” If I asked Florence for whom all this subterfuge was intended, she simply answered, “Whoever needs to find me knows where I am.”
Her tight-lipped-ness I’d long made my peace with. Why, then, after my lunch with Yasha Gendler, did it set my teeth on edge that there might be things about my mother—humiliating, atrocious things—that others knew, or believed they knew, and that I did not? Over and over I’d weighed every word I’d spoken to Yasha and felt ugly about the indifference I’d affected. “Touch shit and you’re the one who smells”—that had always been my motto in dealing with unsavory innuendo. Not for a moment did I believe Yasha’s suggestion that Florence had betrayed her friends and neighbors to the Soviet secret police. And yet I was pained by the unfair impression my mask of amused silence must have made on him.
And so, at midnight, with a glass of Rémy in my hand and wearing only my pajama bottoms, I found myself climbing the eight steps up to my attic office and booting up my Dell. I cracked open the skylight above my head and let in, through the liquid reaches of the night, the restless summer screeches of the cats and raccoons.
I called up a browser and in the search window, in Russian, typed “repressions,” “stalin,” “FSB,” and “archives.” In .45 seconds, the search engine returned 48,535 entries. Most of the links were to articles or academic texts, though those gave way to personal accounts: unpublished stories, poems, and screeds pertaining to brothers, fathers, uncles swallowed up by Stalin’s terror. The Internet was undeniably demonstrating that the affliction of graphomania, to which Dostoyevsky claimed every Russian was predisposed, had blossomed into a disease as contagious as it was incurable. I shivered at the thought of adding my number to that roll of countrymen sucked back endlessly into the past.
When I limited my search to recent news stories I found what I was looking for—articles in several prominent newspapers covering the announcement that the Russian government had made just months earlier: The FSB had declassified millions of documents on victims of repressions. Relatives could now request information about those who’d been executed in prison or deported to camps.
I’d missed that window in ’92. Traveling back there had been the furthest thing from my mind. I had work to do, and my mother’s growing list of ailments to manage. And she, I was sure, had no desire to reopen chapters of her life she’d so carefully forgotten. Now I wondered if my failure to raise the topic with Mama had been inspired by a fear of trespass. Our relationship was fraught enough without adding this to the mix. That summer was still entangled for me with the memory of our last fight, which it anguished me now to recall. My mother had suffered a stroke. For days, her right side was paralyzed. Gradually, she began to recover her speech and movement. But there was no longer any question of her living alone. With unsettled feelings, Lucya and I relocated her to a nearby group home. She’d been at the facility for almost a year when doctors operated on her leg. A few days after she was released from the hospital, I visited Mama in the nursing home and discovered that the undersides of her legs and her backside were covered with bedsores. The so-called caretakers were clearly neglecting to sponge-bathe her in a timely manner and properly apply ointment to her sores. Enraged, I started berating the nursing assistant on duty—an imperious imbecile who continued to insist, even as I pointed to the subclean sheets, that everything had been done properly and “according to procedure.” I informed the woman that only a mental incompetent could fail to see my mother was in serious discomfort. I demanded to speak with the doctor in charge. That was when the nurse stormed out, maybe to find her superior, more likely to complain about me while she sucked a cigarette or whatever it was she normally did instead of tending to her patients.
But all of this is only the backdrop to the crucial part of the story: While I had been chewing out the nurse, Florence, reclining in her metal bed, would not stop interjecting that everything was “just fine.” Why was I making a fuss, she demanded, when she was feeling “absolutely all right” (though she had confessed quite the opposite to me minutes earlier)? There was “no need to make trouble,” she kept insisting to me, smiling wanly at her idiotic caretaker.
I could understand her impulse to appease when the nurse was within hearing range, but she continued defending her own abuse even after the woman had stormed out. “These people know how to do their job.”
“If these people were doing their jobs,” I said, “your backside wouldn’t be covered in sores.”
As if not hearing me, she said, “They take care of it their own way. They know best.”
They know what they’re doing. They know best. It was the refrain I’d been hearing from her all my life. For heaven’s sake, I thought, you are eighty-two years old. You’ve been living in a free country for thirteen years now. Why must you compulsively parade your loyalty to whatever cruel and indifferent master happens at this moment to be pressing his boot on your neck?
What I did in fact say was “Enough, Mama. I’m doing the talking now.”
We remained locked in disagreement until the day she died, less than a year later. Now, with my mother buried along with her silences, I googled the names of activists quoted in the news articles, and came upon the object of my search: a website called MEMORIAL. Apparently, it was a Russian society dedicated to the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin’s repressions. The website was forlorn-looking, a Gulag of defunct links, many of which, like the victims the site represented, were themselves “under rehabilitation.” But toward the bottom was the name of the webhost, listed simply as [email protected]. For a full minute, I let my cursor hover uneasily over the address. I pictured Yasha’s gloating face. His invitation had been a challenge. What was I afraid of?
I double-clicked on the link and composed a short email asking how and to whom I was supposed to address my request for my parents’ documents. Judging by the site, I didn’t expect an answer. I pressed send and closed the window. Now Yasha could be satisfied.
Only I wasn’t. If there were any secrets to be found, there was one person I knew who might reveal them. And I was overdue to pay him a visit.
—
The Avalon was unlike any place to which one might attach the words “retirement” or “home.” The reception area, with ferns and planted palms, large armchairs, carved wooden side tables with exotic ironware artifacts, and a grand Steinway in the corner, resembled a waiting room in some far-flung U.S. embassy. The residents looked like vacationers shuffling about in their loafers and Bermuda shorts. On my way out to the patio I consulted the calendar, on which the weekly activities were mixed in among such notable events as: