“Don’t cry, Essie, or can you at least take off my dress?”
“Sorry,” Essie said, wiping her dripping nose on her bare arm. She removed Florence’s dress, revealing the girders of her yellowed brassiere and drawers. “Oh, look at me,” she cried. “I didn’t even have new bloomers or a proper girdle to bring along with me. If my mother was still alive, she’d have taken me to get one, but I didn’t want to ask my father for the money. Oh, Florence, he didn’t even come to see me off. And the worst part is, I’m to blame. It’s true, because I told him not to come. I didn’t think he’d listen….Don’t make that face!”
“I’m not.”
“I thought he’d come anyway. But I said so many nasty things to him. Such awful things…See, we were all supposed to be on this ship together. My papa, my little sister Lilly, and my mother too…Oh, you’ll think I’m horrible if I tell you.”
“Sweetie, I wouldn’t.” Florence picked up Essie’s old clothes off the floor and sat down beside her. “Whatever it is, it’s all behind us now.”
For most of my life people have called me Yulik, though I go by Julian now. In spite of my coming into the world on the black banks of the Volga, my birth certificate unambiguously states my nationality as “American.” This honor I owe to my mother, Florence Fein, who at the time must have thought it wiser to have me catalogued as a Yankee than a Yid. (She herself could claim both heritages.) In 1943, on the cusp of a not at all certain victory against the Nazis, her decision might have been driven by the same logic that ensured that all the Jewish boys of my generation would proceed through life with their foreskins intact. Then again, maybe it wasn’t the invading fascists that Florence was nervous about, but her own Soviet comrades.
Who the hell can say?
I never asked my mother what was behind her decision, and I doubt she would have given me a straight answer if I had. Suppressions and omissions were an unshakable habit of hers, as they are of so many who carry on unreciprocated romances with doomed causes. As camouflage, “American” turned out to be about as good a cover for “Jew” as a sweater on a Chihuahua. It did, however, alter my life in one important respect: it gave a clear shape (a sovereign border, you might say) to my feelings of apartness. Maybe there is nothing remarkable about this today, when no worse fate can befall a child than to be ordinary. But in my time, when a modest, inconspicuous presence was a useful commodity, my Americanness was the port-wine stain that made me a freak and aristocrat. Even at the state children’s home, where I was terrified of the other boys learning of my difference, I nursed a bitter pride at my secret connection to the avocado-colored portion of the map about which our teachers spoke with such reverent loathing.
It was not until I actually set foot on American soil in 1979 that I was suddenly turned back into another Soviet pumpkin. The polite confusion on my patrons’ faces told me that the English I’d been speaking (largely in my head) since I was a child was about as comprehensible to them as Mandarin. I’d like to think that in my three decades as an American citizen I’ve come far in reclaiming my patrimony. I drink my beer chilled. I floss. I tip at least 15 percent. My accent is now of indeterminate origin. On the occasions when I’m obliged to travel back to Russia, I’m pleased to discover that my former countrymen identify me first and foremost by the blue color of my passport.
So why have I been traveling back? The simplest answer is that I am now employed in a business that has done more to advance the cause of Cooperation and Friendship between our two glorious nations than have decades of international peace talks and nonproliferation treaties. I am speaking of Big Oil. For the past four years I’ve been employed by one of the half-dozen oil-and-gas firms whose Washington offices form a tight little semicircle (or noose, some might say) around our nation’s capital. My own expertise is in icebreakers—those thousand-ton megalosauruses that chew through glaciers so that you and I can get our tanks pumped with the dregs of Paleozoic graveyards. Now that several of these graveyards have been discovered in the Russian Arctic, I have no shortage of work. Every few months, I pack my polycarbonate Rimowa and board the red-eye for Moscow. By morning, I’m clearing customs at Sheremetyevo under the wordless gaze of a matron whose exquisite contempt in comparing my face with the mug shot in my passport reminds me that in Russia I am, like any other national, a nobody. For this refreshing humiliation I am handsomely compensated.
Lest it seem that money is the only reason I fly back, it isn’t so. What I most count on is the chance to see my son, Lenny, who for the past nine years has been chasing his own fortune in Moscow. Chasing, indeed. There are a few things Lenny hasn’t told me that I happen to know anyway. But persuading my son to cut his losses in Russia and come home has proven even harder than extricating my mother was thirty years ago. Wanderlust and stubbornness are homologous traits in our family. Were Florence still alive, she would be impressed with how her grandson has managed to dig in his heels. Her own refusal to budge was a masterpiece of dignified mutiny as monumental as one of Gandhi’s hunger strikes. In 1978, as we were getting ready to exit, she not only declined to emigrate with the rest of the family; she even refused to utter the word “America.” Only after a brush with incapacity did she start timidly, testingly, bringing up the topic. “Are you still planning to go to…that place?” was how she put it. That place. A couple of years ago, I read about a neurological condition that can afflict victims of stroke. A person suffering from this condition can look at a lightbulb and tell you its components—the filament, the wire, the glass. He can describe the shape and its properties. But for all the gold in Araby he’ll never be able to screw it in and turn it on. “Agnosia” is the formal name of the condition. Ancient Greek for “not-knowing.” There is no injury to the senses, no loss of memory. Simply, a person has lost the ability to recognize something for what it is. I’ve often wondered if a similar kind of menace had gotten its fingers around Mama.
Maybe I would have been less hard on my mother had she been another ordinary Russian afflicted with that national form of Stockholm syndrome they call patriotism. But she wasn’t. She was, like I am now, an American. More so. She had grown up on the elm-lined streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, debated the Federalist Papers at Erasmus Hall High, studied mathematics among the first emancipated coeds at Brooklyn College, tuned in to Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats, and watched Cagney kiss Harlow on the projection screen at the Paramount. No matter how much she pretended to have forgotten it all, I was never convinced that all that New York upbringing could be stripped from memory like so much scabbed paint. Surely, I insist even now, she must have once known what freedom smelled like.