How had a sixty-five-year-old retiree living on a skimpy state pension maneuvered to save such wads? She would have claimed it was by living on nothing but sardines and black coffee, and almost never buying a new coat, and getting the same pair of shoes resoled winter after winter. But how had she obtained the money in the first place? That is a more interesting question, and the best way I can begin to answer it is to say that, after two decades in post-Stalin Moscow, my mother had built up for herself a rather lucrative sideline.
Her day job, until she formally retired at the age of fifty-five, was that of a third-level sales clerk in a bookshop, the House of the Book—or, more specifically, the smaller annex that winged it, known as the House of the Foreign Book. It happened to be one of the only spots in the city where one could obtain foreign literature—dictionaries, English translations of Pasternak and Chekhov, as well as popular paperbacks by Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Hailey, Erich Maria Remarque. Also, English textbooks of the kind much in demand by the ambitious mothers of a new generation of adolescents, the MGIMO set who were driven to class in black Volgas. The overdressed, competitive wives of the new nomenklatura, eager to launch their children into diplomatic posts and careers that would require them to know “proper English” unbutchered by the national schoolteachers, who taught it without ever having heard it spoken aloud.
The job in the bookshop paid next to nothing, but it gave Mama a chance to show off her skills. She always knew how to spot them, the women in imported knee boots strutting in for the first time in search of primers and phrase books, and Florence would lead them politely to the dim back of the store where she could wax on about the advantages and quality of various textbooks, allowing herself to demonstrate by reading a few lines from the books in her flawless English, until the mothers ventured to ask about her “history” and she, smilingly, gave them the very abbreviated version—along with her telephone number, should they “have any questions” about the book they’d bought. After that would come first the invitation to tea. Before long she was tutoring students privately every night of the week, with a waiting list growing longer by the month. On Sundays, while I sat cramming for my own college entrance exams, my mother was making her rounds of the well-appointed apartments atop the Lenin Hills, arriving with mimeographed lessons and leaving with cash. Her vinegary verdicts on the homes she visited were always delivered in proportion to the solicitous attention she received from her clients. Privately, she mocked her patrons’ offers of French cognac and Dutch chocolates, ridiculed the husbands’ peasant habits and the wives’ lyceum pretensions, rolled her eyes at their lacquered furniture sets and their ikebana flower arrangements. Of one client, an approved Kremlin physician, I recall her remarking, “I can’t say much about her medical skills, though her doctor’s coat is specially tailored so the pockets are nice and deep.” None of these people were, in her opinion, “real communists.” All the real ones were dead.
But even these tart judgments—shared, I’m sure, only with me—were really a measure of nothing more than her own delight at her long-belated independence. She was not these people’s servant anymore; she set her own hours, chose the kids she worked with, and quit if a student did not apply appropriate seriousness to his studies, all the while rolling up her blue, purple, and apricot ruble notes into tight little bundles that she stuffed in her wardrobe between the bedsheets and towels. Her Americanness—the very difference that had once set her so fatally apart—was now the key to her freedom.
Was it this freedom she thought I was trying to deprive her of?
“I don’t want to move out of the city.”
“But we aren’t trying to move you to some village, just closer to us. Closer to your own family. Aren’t you tired of sharing a bathroom with eleven people?”
“I’ve lived through worse.”
“If anything happens to you, I can’t promise that I can be there every day. Not if we’re on opposite sides of the city. I work! Lucya does too.”
“I have my neighbors. They’re decent people. No one yells, no one drinks. And I don’t like the kinds of people who roam around those outer districts.”
“What kind of people? They’re regular people, like us.”
“You don’t have to tell me….I’ve seen them…ordinary workers, drunkards…those whole neighborhoods…a complete absence of culture. No theaters, no bookstores—it isn’t living, it’s vegetating. It’s some kind of punishment.”
“You won’t be much farther from the center than you are now. We live right by a metro stop. And neighbors are not the same thing as family. This is a good time to buy—and let me remind you, Mama, you are not getting younger.”
“Do you plan to bury me already?”
I talked myself hoarse, to no avail.
—
ALL OF THIS SHOULD have given me ample warning of the territory I’d be entering two years later, when we went from discussing my mother’s move to the exurbs to a journey of far greater distance. A few things had changed by then. I had gone from being a promising doctoral candidate to being another Jew denied a degree, and I had finally understood that whatever fresh breezes of cultural change I’d whiffed would never mask the stench of my country’s rot. Like many, I had allowed myself to hope, and had been made to pay for my optimism.
And then, just as fast as my horizons collapsed, they opened up again. Bushels of American grain, imported to shore up the embarrassments of our kolkhozes, were now ensuring my family’s unmolested passage out of our suffocating confinement. Never could I have imagined that my mother would pose the greatest barrier to my departure.
“Hasn’t everything already been discussed?” she said, innocent-eyed, each time I asked her if she planned to come with us to America, or, as she called it, “that place.” So consistent was her avoidance of the word that anyone listening might have thought she and I were still arguing about deporting her to Moscow’s suburbs. “Mama, we’re not leaving without you.”
“No, no.” A curt head-shaking dismissal. “My life is where it is.”
“I can’t just let you stay here, all by yourself.”
“I can manage.”
“That isn’t the point! We’re applying for the documents. We’re set on leaving. Do you understand what that means?”
“I’m not planning to get in your way,” she said, as if all of this was just an unpleasant misunderstanding. “Whatever papers you need me to sign, I won’t put up a fight.”
This last ludicrous barrier to immigration was still on the Soviet law books: every grown adult wishing to emigrate needed his or her mommy’s or daddy’s permission in writing. I had her consent but not her cooperation. One afternoon, she arrived at our apartment to sign the papers that would allow Lucya and me to leave the country.
“Mother, this is your last chance,” I said. “You’ll be parted from me—from the kids—forever. Is that what you really want?”
I could see she was visibly aquiver, in spite of all her restraint. I didn’t care. I was done playing nice. I wanted to rattle her.
“Is it?” I demanded.