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In a half whisper Tanya told her about Luciano.
“I’d go,” Auntie Roza said.
“But you …” Her aunt’s husband had left her many years ago, when their children were still in grade school, and she’d never remarried. “How will I look Anton in the eye? It’d be so stupid for me to run there like some prostitute. They already have their own, from Intourist, KGB-trained.”
“Not like a prostitute, Tanya. Like a woman. When will you have a chance to enjoy such an exotic man again? Italians, they’ve got a temper. Anton is a good man, I’m not arguing. But … he’s Anton. He’ll be there on that couch for all eternity. Go, enjoy. Could be your last chance. I met, once, in Bulgaria, a certain engineer … Bulgarians love Russians, you know.” Auntie Roza pressed her ringed hand to her chest, which was rosy and laced with delicate spiderwebs of wrinkles. It struck Tanya as incredibly beautiful—and this, too, reminded her of her mother. She was overcome by a desire to rest her head on Auntie Roza’s soft shoulder—to forget about Luciano and her obligations to her family.
“He was tall, very good-looking. Such beautiful black eyebrows,” Auntie Roza continued. “I didn’t go, I was a good wife. To this day I bite my elbows in regret.”
The bedsheets next to them moved.
“What, Sergeich? Spying on us?” Auntie Roza said.
Sergeich emerged from behind his cover. Balding, with a stained undershirt stretched over his paunch and a grouchy expression, he seemed to have stepped out of the dictionary entry for “kommunalka neighbor, male.”
“Err … Roza Vasilievna, would you be so kind as to spare a pinch of salt. I’m all out.” His bite-sized white poodle twirled around his feet.
“Oh, you should have listened,” Auntie Roza said, holding out her salt dish.
Sergeich blushed. “You”—he addressed both of them, his tone philosophical—“you womenfolk are odd. I want to say …” He dove under the sheets to his oven, then reappeared and returned the salt. “First you complain …” He looked at the floor and said through his teeth, “One simply cannot understand women, and it’s your own fault.” He pouted his thin, lilac lips.
“My dear Mikhal Sergeich. Don’t get so upset. Like all normal people, women just want a little corner of happiness.” Auntie Roza smiled coquettishly and threw the poodle a piece of her cutlet.
“If it were me, I’d be careful with the foreigners.” Sergeich looked in Tanya’s direction. “There’s a reason why the State wants to keep us regular citizens away. It’s for our own protection. I’ve never met any real foreigners myself, but I’ve heard such stories—ogogo!”
“What stories?” Tanya asked.
“Well, I heard from a friend of a friend who knows someone who’s friends with one of the Party kids. You know, they all travel to the West like it’s Crimea. So, that particular comrade lived in America for a year and he said that they have special pornography schools there.” Sergeich made a sour face at Auntie Roza. “They teach … technique and some kind of philosophy of love there, as if it could be taught.” He hit his chest. “It’s amoral and it’s expensive. They don’t have free education there, so not everyone can attend. Those who do, you know, they have to bring a partner. They don’t have to be married, and—can you imagine?—it doesn’t even have to be a woman for a man. You know what I mean? They study special books and have homework assignments, also class demonstrations. As if it was some woodworking class!”
Pea Soup barged into the kitchen, tore through the bedsheets, and yelled out of the window: “Kolya! Grisha! Lunch is ready. March home on the double!” The poodle began to yap again. Pea Soup squatted down and clapped her big hands right by the dog’s flappy ears.
“Don’t you dare do that again, grazhdanka!” Sergeich yelled after Pea Soup. “Tak, where was I? These so-called students learn to hold—well, you know what I’m talking about—for a whole hour and sometimes more. And during the, the … during this, they see God. Yes, God. It is insulting to me even as a nonbeliever. But this is in America, I don’t know about Italy. Or Bulgaria.” Tanya thought she saw Sergeich wink at Auntie Roza.
“Are you sure it’s not the yogis in India?” Tanya said.
“An orgasm for an hour? That would finish Comrade Brezhnev right off.” Auntie Roza laughed, a beautiful, throaty trill. Sergeich’s face was completely purple now. “Those Americans must have a lot of free time. Italians, on the other hand, they don’t need any special schools. They have passion in their blood.”
“Now is not Yezhovshchina, of course, but it never hurts to be careful,” Sergeich whispered, then in full voice: “Remember that the State disapproves of intermingling with foreigners. It’s for our own protection, Tanya.”
“But what could happen?”
Sergeich stared at her with incredulity.
Tanya envisioned Luciano’s shapely olive arms. Her skin prickled.
“Every room in the hotel is bugged by the KGB. You may get accused of spying, that’s what. Arrested,” Sergeich said. “Or you could get recruited to spy on the Italians.”
“Mikhal Sergeich, my darling, what are you talking about? First of all, this is a onetime thing. Second, she’s not going there to talk.” Auntie Roza finally gave him the smile he’d been waiting for.
“Spying … I don’t have time for a second career,” Tanya said, a little exhilarated just thinking of the idea.
The women picked up their pans of food and went to eat in Auntie Roza’s room.
“Don’t listen to him, Tanechka. Listen to me,” Auntie Roza said, meeting Tanya’s eyes over the perfect nostalgic borsch.
The giant Children’s World department store stood across the square from Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters. Entering the first floor, with its marble columns, a sparkling double-decker carousel, and endless rows of toys still gave Tanya the same thrills she’d felt here as a child on her family’s transits through Moscow. Practical things first, Tanya said to herself, and marched up to a line that started at the base of the stairs. She took her spot at the tail and tapped the woman in front of her on the shoulder.
“What are we standing for?” Tanya asked.
“Finnish snowsuits.”
“God help us. What number?”
The woman showed Tanya her palm with “238” written on it in pen. Tanya pulled a pen out of her purse and wrote on her own palm: “239.”
The woman’s cheekbones were beautifully pronounced, convex like the bowls of soupspoons. “And where are you from?” she asked Tanya in a soft, friendly voice.
Too nice for a Muscovite.
“From Vladivostok,” Tanya lied.
Magadan was famous for having been the entry point to the cruelest of Stalin’s network of camps. People might think her parents had sat there; and if they were arrested, then there must’ve been a reason. Now people were paid good money to live in the northeast. It wasn’t a good idea to advertise either.
“And you?”
“Odessa. I’m buying the snowsuit for my relatives in Arkhangelsk.”
While they chatted about children and tricks for procuring this or that defitsit item, the line crawled up the stairs. The woman’s name was Zina. Tanya also made friends with a man behind her, Denis from Sverdlovsk, and asked him to hold her place. In the shoe department on the third floor, she was lucky to happen upon some Yugoslavian winter boots. She got two pairs, two sizes too big for the boys to grow into. For now, she’d sew a little pouch of wool inside the toe.
The line for Finnish snowsuits climbed to the second landing. Denis gave Tanya a nod of cooperation, and she dashed to the fourth floor, where she stood in two lines for a pencil box, a stack of notebooks, and a yellow backpack with cars printed on the flap. Others held Tanya’s place in the toy line on the ground level, while she held places for Zina and Denis in the snowsuits. The store was stuffy; in the thick of the lines it reeked of sweat and cologne. She ran downstairs and prized out a microscope for Borya, lettered blocks for Pavlik, and a box of toy soldiers for her friend’s son.
Tanya returned to the snowsuits line, which had finally scaled the second floor, and waited for another hour. She could already see the big brown box out of which fluttered the puffy aquamarine snowsuits. After a few more minutes of waiting she heard screams at the front of the line. A wave of people threw her back, and immediately she knew: They’d run out. They’d run out of Finnish snowsuits!
At first Tanya bobbed in the whirlpool of other anguished shoppers—elbows out, bags in—all hoping for a miracle. Her throat prickled with tears, and eventually she gave up. She knew that the clerks had stashed away extra pairs, but they would distribute them through their network of relatives and friends. There was no use begging.
She staggered out to the street. She didn’t have time to waste, yet she couldn’t bear leaving the store. She still had so much to find. When she returned home, Anton wouldn’t go out of his way to praise her exertions. There was nothing heroic or special about these shopping expeditions, a common burden shared by hundreds of millions of her fellow grazhdanki. It seemed unbelievable that just a few hours before, Luciano had invited her to a hotel. What was he doing now? Training on a soccer field or sightseeing the best, cleanest, approved-for-foreigners parts of Moscow with the voluptuous Intourist spies?
Tfoo, princessa. Her mother and Auntie Roza had lived through the famine and war, and here she was—too good for lines. She looked at the Lubyanka building, where so many of Magadan’s prisoners had started their journeys.
A babushka, her face yellow and wrinkled like a spoiled apple, pulled Tanya down the street and around the corner. From prior shopping adventures, Tanya knew that the pensioners who lived close to the big stores often got up early to stockpile the most coveted items and resell them at a profit. As the babushka unzipped the suitcase with her knobby hands, Tanya prayed for the snowsuit.
“Bought something for my granddaughter, dearie, and it turned out the wrong size,” the babushka said, twisting her head, on the lookout for the police.
She held up a pink rabbit coat with fur balls on the ends of the zippers.
“I have a son,” Tanya said. Disappointment settled acridly in her stomach.
The toothless babushka proved to be a real shark when it came to persuasion, and in the end Tanya bought the coat. She could try to exchange it for something else in Magadan, although in all likelihood Pavlik would end up wearing it. Luckily, he was still too young to be teased.
At the National Department Store on Red Square, Tanya secured a lacy East German bra, which was so much more delicate than the gray, industrial Soviet make, built for sturdy kolkhoz girls. Also: a box of Polish toothpaste and lotion, stockings, and three Czechoslovakian shirts and a quality photo album for Anton. He would be so happy. A tube of French lipstick was passed to her over the heads of others in exchange for money. Its color was a mystery.
In a shopping frenzy, Tanya snapped up the last Yugoslavian silk dress without trying it on. Although its limited availability was its most important quality, she later discovered that it was also beautiful: the color of a lily pad with contours of large-petaled flowers embroidered in white thread at the shoulders and side seams. The neckline plunged bravely deep. She didn’t know where she’d wear it: the dress was too light for Magadan, even in the summer. To a house party, maybe, with a shawl.
Tanya set out for her last shopping destination, the House of the Book on Arbat, stopping every twenty steps to rub her reddened palms and switch around the heavy bags. She imagined the headline in tomorrow’s newspapers: “Woman Found Drowned in Moskva River, Still Clutching Bags.”
She walked and thought. Despite the official State philosophy that the USSR was the best country in the world, Russians were always on the hunt for importny things. The best you could get was from the Warsaw Pact countries—especially Yugoslavia, which was almost half capitalist and bordered with Italy. Polish cosmetics were good but not comparable to French. Those you could get only in Moscow, only at the National Department Store. The appearance of Italian shoes was an event. People from the Eastern bloc looked better, too, and people from the capitalist West seemed to be made from higher-quality material altogether: whiter teeth, broader shoulders, happier faces.
Luciano had grown up surrounded by beauty. Tanya knew from studying art and from the travel programs on television that Italy was full of well-preserved palazzos and facades decorated with paintings and stone cupids. Hundreds of nude sculptures sunbathed in the piazzas and cooled off in street fountains. Maybe Luciano’s eyes were simply better trained to see a woman’s beauty?
Why couldn’t Anton see it? After all, he could appreciate a pair of three-hour-line shoes for their ordinary, magnificent shoeness. Had she succumbed to him too easily? They had dated during their last year of university, and Tanya didn’t want to be the last unmarried girl at the graduation.
Auntie Roza opened the door and took some of the bags off Tanya’s numb hands. One naked lightbulb in a row of five burned furiously in the hallway. Pea Soup’s slouchy husband was smoking by the communal telephone. His hair was a violent red—a comical contrast to his straw-yellow eyebrows and eyelashes—as though his fiery crown had drawn out all the pigment from below. His sons (their hair the same Red Banner hue) rattled back and forth down the hallway, the elder on his indestructible bicycle and the younger, about Borya’s age, with a saucepan helmet and a soccer ball. The Ivanovs’ baby wailed. The poodle barked behind Sergeich’s door. The hallway smelled of old cigarettes, fried meat, stewed cabbage, more pea soup, and something putrid—perhaps the dog’s revenge on its neighbors.
“I’m just waiting for an intercity call. Do you need the phone? It should come any moment now,” Pea Soup’s husband muttered.
“Relax, Lyosha. I’m not your wife,” Auntie Roza said. “Please tell your boys not to ride over the shoes.”
When they reached the haven of Auntie Roza’s room, Auntie Roza said, “Shto, got lucky?”
“Oh, yes. Now the shower.”
“Not the best time, Tanechka. Everyone’s cooking dinner, you see. We only have one heater between the kitchen and the washroom.”
“You said it would be your turn in the evening.”
“It is my turn, but—”
“You let them bully you?”
“What can I do? They’ve lived here longer than I. You could try tying a dishrag around the kitchen faucet—that’s our sign for hot water needed in the bathroom—but I doubt it’ll work.”
“Oh, Auntie.”
The kitchen was in midbattle. The laundry had been taken down from the ropes. The three female household heads and Sergeich, the lonesome penguin, were cutting, shredding, frying, boiling, meat grinding, and dough rolling at their stations. The oil hissed, the pans banged, the radio yowled like a frantic mother calling for her child in a crowd of strangers. Sergeich winked at Tanya. She tied the dishrag around the faucet and escaped to the bathroom. As she showered, the water went hot and cold every few minutes, then just as she was washing off, it shut off completely.
“For your rendezvous?” Auntie Roza said when Tanya returned to her room. She was holding up the new dress to herself in front of the wall mirror.
“What rendezvous?” Tanya tried to keep her voice dispassionate. “I’m dog tired. I’d rather spend the evening with you.” This, too, was true. “Tell me stories about when you and Mama were girls.”
“You’ve heard all of our stories a million times, Tanechka,” Auntie Roza said. “Straighten out your shoulders and try to make yourself a little happier. If you don’t, no one will.”
“I’m not sure this would make me happier. Honestly.”
On the one hand, she didn’t want to disturb the precarious balance of her life. On the other hand, there was the beautiful dress—a defitsit to everyone else and readily wearable to her. “I’ll just try it on. If it’s too big, I’ll leave it for you.”
Tanya slipped on the dress and looked at herself in the mirror. It fit as though tailor-made, accentuating her waist—not as small as in her youth but still workable—her narrow, sloping shoulders, her diminutive but adequately perky breasts.
“Look at you,” Auntie Roza exclaimed, but Tanya had already grabbed her makeup bag and dashed out of the room.
The washroom was occupied. She couldn’t go back to her aunt’s room, not yet; she knew what Auntie Roza would say. She ran to the bathroom. Free! She switched on what she hoped was Auntie Roza’s lightbulb, sat down on the toilet, and put her makeup bag in her lap. Squinting into a hand mirror, Tanya put on some blue eye shadow and mascara. The new French lipstick turned out to be a clownish shade of orange, so she wrapped the tip of a match in a piece of cotton ball, something she always kept handy, and scraped out leftover coral paste from her old lipstick tube.
Someone hammered on the door. The bleary-eyed young father of the restless baby, clutching a roll of toilet paper to his chest. Tanya got out of his way.
Back in her aunt’s room, she sat down at the table, from which she could see herself in the mirror. She put her hair up in a bun. The hairstyle showed off her small ears, the only part of her body she’d consistently liked.
Neither the makeup nor the hairstyle had altered her features, yet she hardly recognized herself. The exhaustion in her eyes lit up her face with a kind of wistful nobility. She wanted Luciano to see that he was right to pick her from a plane of other dusty people. Tipsy off this sudden metamorphosis, some romantic essence of her separated and floated above her tired body like those happy lovers in Chagall’s paintings. She wouldn’t get in trouble with the KGB for one time, would she?
“Go, Tanya. Go,” Auntie Roza said. Before Tanya could duck, Auntie Roza spritzed her with the unfashionable Red Moscow perfume and made the sign of the cross.
It was seven o’clock. As Tanya skipped down the five flights of stairs, even the clicking of her heels seemed brighter.
“Ah, Tanechka, I forgot to feed you!” she heard her aunt yell from the top of the stairs, but her hunger had already evaporated, along with her shame and fatigue.
Tanya’s skin tingled pleasantly in the evening cool that had descended on panting Moscow. The tram came right away, and she sailed the two stops humming quietly to herself. She was walking to the metro entrance when she saw that at the fruit stand by the station they were selling bananas.
Bananas! Golden crescents, honeyed smiles, the fruit of sun-soaked dreams. They were even more rare in Moscow than Italian shoes. Seven-year-old Borya had eaten bananas only twice in his life. Chomping off the thinnest disks one by one to prolong the pleasure, he ran around the apartment pretending to be a monkey on a whirlwind adventure. The bananas were right out of the cartoons about Africa, right out of Mowgli—evidence of a world beyond Magadan’s snowy winters and cold summers. Pavlik had never tasted them.
The line curved around the block.
Tanya lingered, then took a few steps toward the metro, which made her feel like a criminal. She took her place at the end of the line. Maybe there would still be enough time, maybe Luciano would wait. She stood, pelting the backs of fellow line standers with all the anger and frustration accumulated in her line-standing life.
Thirty minutes passed. Her whole being itched with indecision. Flecks of her new beautiful skin, the ones blessed with Auntie Roza’s pungent Red Moscow, fluttered across the vast, indifferent city toward Hotel Rossiya, to Luciano, with his shiny hair and olive oil–rubbed lips. She understood that bananas would have a relatively small impact on the bright future she hoped for her sons. Yet, their future would begin when she returned home, and she had the power to make it a little sweeter. Gradually, the romantic kite of her soul descended back to her body. She felt tired and overdressed. Like herself.
When at last it was her turn, Tanya saw that the sales clerk was drawing bananas from two different boxes. One contained taut yellow bunches, while bananas from the other box were covered with brown spots.
“Excuse me, are you selling rotten bananas?” Tanya cried out.
“And what else am I supposed to do with them, grazhdanka? Throw them out? I have to move the product. If you don’t want them, I have plenty of other customers who will take them with joy and be grateful.”
Tanya bought three bunches—the allotment per person. Only one was in the early stages of rot. She looked at her watch: seven fifty. It would take her at least forty minutes to get to the hotel by metro. She could try catching a taxi, though she doubted there’d be any in this area. Surely someone would pick up a hitchhiker.
Twenty minutes later not a single car had stopped. Was her dress scaring people off? Clutching bananas to her chest, she turned the corner to a poplar-lined street and sat down on a bench. The pollen swirled around her like snow. There had been a time when the distinctions between right and wrong seemed indisputable, and doing right felt good. When all the decisions had been premade and in her best interest. Back when she didn’t need so much to be happy.
She remembered sitting once as a girl on the bank of the Volga River. She had just finished a shift of volunteering at the kolkhoz with her Young Pioneers brigade. Soon it would be dark, and the Pioneers would build bonfires and sing songs about loyalty, valor, and honor. Tanya remembered how her hands hurt from pulling carrots all day. She knelt and dipped them into the river. The water was so cold, a shudder ran up her arms and jolted her heart. She tried in vain to scrub the black soil from under her nails. She lifted up her eyes in time to see the last sunray strike a little fire on the golden cupola of a country church on the opposite bank. She felt at the center of her life then, separate from the world only in a way that could allow her to improve it. Although her future seemed vague, its every mysterious facet glimmered with light and possibility.
Early the next morning Tanya loaded up on several kinds of sausages and cheese, ham, smoked meat, good Hungarian wine and canned fruit, good vodka for Anton, and fresh produce at the grocery store near Auntie Roza’s. She found two sturdy boxes sitting by the garbage dump in the courtyard. One of them, Tanya was shocked to discover, was from a color TV, a defitsit unavailable in stores even in Moscow. Luckily, the foam forms were still intact—perfect for fruits and vegetables. She hurriedly repacked everything again for optimal transportability.
At the airport, the loudspeaker announced that the eight-hour nonstop flight to Magadan was delayed because of adverse weather. The terminal swarmed with passengers, stir-crazy from the foul-smelling bathrooms and insufficiency of places to sit. Various personages of questionable intent, particularly gypsies and persons of Caucasian nationality, trolled the waiting halls, panhandling, selling trinkets, and soliciting fortune readings.
Tanya had too many things to carry all at once. She dragged her suitcases up to the end of the check-in line and asked the woman in front of her to keep an eye on them. When she returned for the boxes mere seconds later, the one for the color TV was gone.
She lost her breath, as if punched in the stomach. The bananas. She spun around and around: thousands of people, thousands of boxes of every stripe in continuous movement like atoms. How could she have not foreseen this?
Tanya shuffled back to her place in line. Now she knew with absolute certainty that she’d been happy just a moment ago, steadily on her way home, with presents for everyone. She began to cry. And she couldn’t stop, not when the woman in front of her asked her what was wrong, and not when, pushing her remaining luggage centimeter by centimeter, she reached the counter and handed her passport and ticket to the check-in clerk.
Everything felt wrong, like she was living in a parallel universe, separated by one crucial degree from the one containing the life she was meant to have. This other, true life was visible to her, even palpable at certain instances—like during the births of her sons—but impossible to occupy. She cried from pity for herself, and because of the stupidity of such pity. She cried for Luciano and for Anton. She cried because she’d only loved one boy with the follow-you-over-the-edge-of-the-earth kind of love—at fifteen. She cried for her mother, who had died two years ago, and whom she still missed every day.
For the rest of her wait Tanya haunted the airport, looking in every corner for the missing box, in the weak hope that, upon opening it, the thieves had discovered no color TV and abandoned it. It was eight in the evening when the plane finally took off.
