Hotel Moscow (19 page)

“My mother got it from her grandmother.” Olga’s eyes were wistful. “This is how we pass on our Russian values. Mothers carry the traditions of home and family. By handing over the samovar, they make sure their daughters do so, too.” She opened a door in the buffet below, took out a set of matryoshka nesting dolls, and presented it to Brooke. “I want you to have this. Another heirloom. We are all products of our mothers, and carry their joys and sorrows inside us.”

“Yes.” Brooke’s throat contracted. “Don’t we?”

The finely painted egg-shaped wooden doll of a maiden with
a long, blond braid was beautifully done. Unlike other matryoshka dolls Brooke had seen, hastily painted in broad brush strokes in primary colors, this one was exquisitely detailed by a fine artist. The outside figure carried a wooden pail in her right hand. Behind her stretched a scene of meadows.

Brooke twisted open the doll. The figure nesting inside carried a loaf of bread, and the scene behind her was of a forest. The next doll held a washboard, and the one after her, a crock of cheese. “Oh, Olga. It’s beautiful.”

“I’m glad to give it to my new American friend. It represents our women: delicate, survivors, curators of home and country. There isn’t much we can do to reciprocate your generosity, coming here to help us.”

Brooke cringed. “Well, it’s really a very short visit. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Not so soon!”

Just then the record ended, and Viktor returned from the kitchen. He stepped to the piano and glanced at the open music sheets. “Rimsky-Korsakov?” he asked Brooke. “Or Schubert?”

“Which of you plays?”

“Both of us.” Olga lifted the top of the bench and searched the music sheets. “
Fantaisie
for four hands?”

Moments later, buoyant, enchanted notes tumbled from the couple’s fingers. Brooke watched them, envious of their close relationship, their shared history and values.

And their talent. She couldn’t help thinking of her own failure at mastering the piano. The long hours she practiced, hating every moment of it, had stretched into years of frustration when she tried to please her father. When one teacher despaired, her
father hired another; someone must be able to tease the music out of his tone-deaf Bertha.

At thirteen, along with puberty, Bertha became conscious that she wasn’t merely a replacement for her father’s lost children and her mother’s dead family, that she was more than their entrusted carrier of memories. She was her own person! She stopped the piano lessons and changed her first name. She hadn’t been aware yet that within a few years, at Berkeley, she would fail her parents on a grander scale.

Brooke was so carried away by her thoughts that only when Olga and Viktor played the finale of the piece did it bring her back to reality. She clapped. “Bravo. Bravo.”

“You should come to our weekly musical evening.” Olga turned around on the piano bench. “Viktor also plays the violin.”

Brooke watched him walk to the bedroom. “A good husband and a friend,” she said.

“Yes, and I don’t beat up my woman,” he called from the door with a twitch of a smile.

Brooke laughed at his unexpected humor.

Olga didn’t join in. “That is one more of our national tragedies. Wife-beating is a shameful nonsecret. Women here are punching bags for their drunken, angry men. At least before
perestroika,
women who had their bones broken too frequently could complain to their husband’s supervisor at the factory or appeal to the local party official. Now even those measures are gone.”

Brooke picked up the matryoshka and opened the fifth doll. The figure held up a red apple. Behind her, a river tumbled over rocks. Brooke twisted the doll open to reveal the smallest
wooden matryoshka, the size of an olive pit, who was waving a spoon. Behind her was the opening of a tunnel.

“We Russian women often must dig a tunnel with nothing but a spoon,” Olga remarked. “I understood your message about the Economic Authority. I’ve taken steps already.” She looked around as though concerned that Viktor might hear. “I asked Svetlana to get their files for me.”

“Will she?” Brooke asked. The poor young woman had been through so much this week. Even without the shock, would she be up to the task?

“She has a friend who has access. But getting the files is merely the first step.” Olga gave a rare smile. “I am thinking bigger.”

Brooke studied her. “What are you planning?”

Olga broke into a cough that convulsed her body. When the attack stopped, she said, “It’s time I run for a seat in parliament. If Yeltsin gets his way, he’ll announce new elections in December. There’s a lot that needs to be done for our women.”

Brooke felt small next to this feisty woman. Her own challenges seemed insignificant and self-indulgent. She hugged Olga. “That’s wonderful.”

“I keep complaining about how women’s interests are underrepresented in the Duma, our lower house of representatives. I’m determined to do something concrete. I have some supporters.” She tapped on her cigarette packet. “As much as I disagree with Yeltsin’s methods, I admit that he was right that more competent, educated, and democratic people should fill our parliament.”

“Amen.”

Olga lit a cigarette. “There’s a lot you and I will be able to do if your hunch about the Economic Authority’s correct.”

Brooke winced. “I’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

“So you’ve said. But you were going to participate in my symposium on Tuesday!”

“I’m sorry.” Brooke felt her face redden. “Life is calling me back.”

Olga’s eyebrows pressed together. “You can’t leave yet. I’ll need your help with the investigation.”

“I’m so sorry to disappoint you.” Guilt clutched Brooke’s insides. “But we’ll keep in touch—”

“How? By phone? We can’t trust it.” Olga scrambled back to her feet. “Come with me.” She stepped into the kitchen and returned within a minute with a covered dish.

“Where to?”

But Olga was already in her tiny foyer, where she removed Brooke’s coat as well as her own off the hook.

“Where are we going?” Brooke asked again.

“You’ll see why Russia must join the twentieth century—or we go back to the eighteenth.”

T
HE APARTMENT BUILDING
was quiet tonight. On Saturdays, some neighbors went visiting friends. Svetlana could steal private time in the communal bathroom. She needed to think. And she needed to cleanse herself from Sidorov’s filth that had burrowed since yesterday under her skin like maggots.

She removed her oversize laundry tub,
vanna,
from its hook high on the wall and placed it on the old checkered linoleum. She would never bathe in the claw-foot tub, whose fifty-year-old yellowed enamel had chipped down to the black cast iron and was covered with layers of grime. She brought two pots of boiling water from the kitchen, poured them into the
vanna,
and then added as much warm water as she could get from the faucet.

“Attitude is everything,” Jenny had said. Svetlana threw in petals from two wilted roses she had taken from the Hotel Moscow dining room, and lit two stubs of her remaining
scented candles. When she turned off the one bare light bulb, the warped and moldy plaster on the walls disappeared into the shadows.

Slowly, she lowered herself into the water, savoring its feel against her skin. In the short
vanna
her legs crossed at the ankles, and her bent knees dropped to the sides. She leaned back and wriggled her toes as warmth crept up her body. Brooke had given her a soap bar. The name, Lux, was as delicious as it smelled, and Svetlana would save the satiny wrapper to scent her lingerie and sweaters drawer. She closed her eyes.

“Attitude is everything.” Tonight, in her tub, she would think only happy thoughts, like an American woman. Not a single thought about Sidorov. She would think of Natasha, her girl who was smart and, despite the malnutrition, healthy. And, as she had told Dr. Rozanova, she was happy about democracy, even if it turned out to be different from what she had expected. But Dr. Rozanova wanted her to take part in making new dreams happen. What did she stand to gain? Saving her cooperative and the livelihood of the women who trusted her. What did she have to lose? Everything, including her life.

To fend off the chill in the air, Svetlana used a plastic bowl to splash water over her back and arms and leaned back again, leisurely cupping more warm water and pouring it over her shoulders and chest. Because of democracy, she had been given the chance to meet the Americans, and they turned out to be more wonderful than the magazines had written. Important women like Brooke and Jenny made her feel she was one of them. That, too, was democracy: Everyone was equal—more equal than under communism. Under communism, important people made
sure that everyone knew they were above others by reducing the others to little ants.

Rubbing the soap over a Georgian loofah, soft from years of use, Svetlana created mounds of foam over her breasts and upper arms. The candlelight reflected in the iridescent bubbles. She lathered the tufts of hair under her arms and rinsed well. Ads in Western magazines advertised deodorant. She wasn’t sure how that product did the job. Did one spray stop the body’s production of perspiration? Everywhere, or just on the patch of skin that was sprayed? True, American women emitted no body odor. Interestingly, according to the magazines, American men, too, used deodorant after their daily gym exercises. A couple of times she had stood close to Judd Kornblum and sniffed surreptitiously. He smelled good.

What would it feel like to breathe in the aroma of a fresh, clean, masculine body? What would it feel like to have a handsome man hovering over her, lowering himself tenderly onto her, like she’d seen on TV’s
Simple Maria
?

Was it only yesterday that Nikolai Sidorov had violated her? Last night she had scoured herself to remove the muck and had douched against a chance of pregnancy. Even as she scrubbed again now, the despicable, vile act still dwelled under her skin. But most businessmen behaved this way. That was the reason she hadn’t applied for a job as a secretary, where she could use her language skills. All Help Wanted advertisements stated clearly what was expected: “Long legs. No inhibitions.”

Maybe now that the factory was ruined and Sidorov held her responsible, she would have no choice. Lots of women got used to giving their bosses the personal attention they demanded.

No, Svetlana chided herself. Her thoughts were transgressing into a negative attitude. She should think of happy things, like this instant, treating herself to a luxurious bath with an American soap. Reaching down, she touched her raised mound, the curly, honey-colored hair stirring softly just below the surface of the water. The velvety folds flared, opening with hunger. Heat spread through her veins, mounting, surging. A tight knot contracted deep inside her, bearing downward, demanding relief.

Svetlana arched her back and stretched a rigid leg over the rim of the tub, opening herself, allowing deeper access, blood rushing to her nerve-endings, her breath coming in short gasps. Then time stopped and hung, motionless, waiting for her. Her insides quivered in sweet tremors.

She barely caught her breath when Sidorov’s face popped out of the shadows behind the candles and hung in the air, leering at her.

The banging on the door made her climb out of the tub. She was no closer to deciding what to do about Dr. Rozanova’s request.

On the other side of the door, Zoya grunted and rattled the handle. Any moment, the latch installed after previous locks had been broken would dislodge.

“Just a minute!” Svetlana called. She dropped her weekly laundry into the
vanna.
The warm water, seeped with the remnant of the soap’s fragrance, was too precious to waste.

I
WAS PLANNING TO
visit my friend, Vera, after you left,” Olga told Brooke as they trekked around the block, Olga carrying her covered plate of delicacies. “But I know how blessed she’ll feel to meet you.”

Holding onto Olga’s elbow to steady her, Brooke fixed the beam of her flashlight at the partially paved sidewalk. The night had turned cold. As Olga described Vera’s encounter with the mafia, Brooke’s skin tightened, and dread crawled to her scalp.

Still, she was unprepared for the sight of the woman in bed, her abdomen exposed. Vera’s burned flesh glistened like raw meat. Brooke fought to keep her face composed, but the pain she felt was physical. She became conscious of every stitch of her own clothing: her bra was too tight over her rib cage, the waistband of her pantyhose cut into her skin, her scarf choked her.

Her fists closed, nails digging into her palm. The word
beating
had been repeated so often when Bertha was younger that it had lost its visual effect. Now, it blasted in its full meaning. This
was what torture looked like. This was a version of what her parents had endured. In a split second, her mind’s eye conjured a Nazi guard beating her mother with a stick—a senseless, brutal thrashing that had left her mother limping for the rest of her life. Brooke saw her father being hung with his arms tied backward until he fainted, the reason for the surgeries on his shoulders over the years. This was why her mother had always railed about Americans’ naïveté, about their shutting themselves off from the truth while seeking hedonistic pleasures in moronic TV entertainment. They watched
Fiddler on the Roof
and thought they knew what a pogrom was.

Vera’s mother pulled a hand-knit blanket over her daughter’s knees to create a tent. Vera’s dark eyes, burning with fever, were intelligent, and although her chopped hair stood out in clumps, Brooke could see that this long-limbed woman was beautiful.

Less than three feet separated the bed pushed against the left wall and the built-in cabinet and bookcase on the right wall. A jutting shelf served as a table, wide enough for one chair. Vera’s mother gestured to Brooke to sit, then shuffled out of the tiny room. Brooke remained standing, but found no spot to rest her eyes lest it be perceived as a critical stare.

“They put up the wall to divide the room when Vera’s brother got married,” Olga said by way of explanation. “Then he got a job elsewhere and sold his space rather than give it back to his mother.”

At the orientation before leaving New York, Amanda had talked about the abhorrent living conditions of most Russians, but Brooke had anticipated a modest dwelling like her family’s first apartment in Brooklyn—three tiny yet functional rooms, not
this wretched crowding. Vera was a factory director, and, judging by the number of books on the shelves, an educated woman.

Vera moaned. Olga crouched next to her and uncovered the plate. With her fingers, she fed Vera a small dumpling. “She speaks a little English,” she told Brooke. “She’ll understand what you say.”

Vera nodded, swallowed, and moaned again.

Brooke couldn’t dislodge a sound. “I’m so sorry about what happened,” she finally managed to say, her voice tinged with tears. Then the dam broke. She was stunned by her own burst of crying. “So sorry,” she murmured and turned her head away, embarrassed. She wasn’t the victim here.

“Honor to meet you,” Vera croaked.

Brooke buried her face in her hands, crying.

Olga patted her back.

“Sorry.” Brooke stepped away. She must compose herself. What would these valiant women think of the spoiled New Yorker?

“You never imagined that teaching our women business skills would mean literally watching them fight for their lives,” Olga said, handing Brooke her handkerchief.

“I truly apologize.” Brooke sniffed, but unable to control herself, she went on crying. “Just let me get some fresh air. I’ll be right back,” she managed to say. With such a display, surely Olga would think her emotionally unstable. Brooke had never before had a public meltdown. When at age four she had tried a temper tantrum, her mother said that having endured the Nazis, she could stand up to a child’s fit. After that, Bertha cried only when she was alone.

Brooke made her way out to the broken sidewalk, where her bottled-up grief surged, heaved, and finally subsided into hiccups. She wiped her eyes and looked around at the darkened buildings. Had the Russians, and then the Ukrainians, followed by the Nazis, not destroyed her mother’s family, her mother would still be here, living like this. Her mother’s siblings probably would still be alive. Her mother would have been a whole person, not the mourning shell she had become. She would have married a Jewish man whom she loved, and Brooke would have been born in the Soviet Union. She could have been Vera or Svetlana or Irina. Or, if more fortunate, Olga. Instead, by several twists of fate and a parade of unbearable miseries, Brooke had become the recipient of the rarest of commodity—luck. She had been lucky to be born in the United States of America.

This was her debt. She had always known that she had been put on earth to rectify the world’s atrocities; she had been born with the responsibility of redressing all the injustices her parents—and by extension, all humanity—suffered. This was how one repaid luck.

Back in Vera’s apartment, Brooke rinsed her face in the communal kitchen sink. “I will explain later,” she told Olga as she handed her back the damp handkerchief, wondering whether she had ruined the fine embroidery, but not knowing what to do about it.

She stood next to Vera’s bed and took the woman’s hand. “Again, I apologize.”

Vera attempted a weak smile. “Olga say you know everything business. That you earn million dollars.”

Brooke smiled, her eyes misting again. “Not even close.”

Olga chuckled. “Americans don’t talk about income. Russians always do.”

“Maybe Russians are right,” Brooke said. Her New York friends discussed their sex lives but never their money.

“Maybe you explain things,” Vera said. Her voice turned weaker, like a week radio signal, and she switched to Russian.

Olga translated. “I—meaning Vera—I am the director of a factory for pots and pans. Not good stuff, everyday quality, Russian level.” Both women let out chortles. “I can’t make sense of what the new owners want. They order us to cast nickel into the bottom of our cheapest pans. What for? Or make copper bowls without finish. Their edges are so sharp you could cut your fingers, but they don’t let us polish them to make them safe. For export, they say. Western cooks don’t mind cutting their fingers?”

Nickel? Copper? The picture became instantly clear. “They know exactly what they’re doing,” Brooke said. She sat down in the chair Vera’s mother had vacated. “The cost of raw metals in Russia is way below the European cartel price, but the European Common Market can’t allow Russia to create unbeatable competition. Metals from Russia must be sold at the higher Common Market prices.” She bent toward the injured woman. “Therefore the nickel and copper are cast into anything, in whichever shape, because Russia is allowed to export to Europe finished products at any price it chooses.”

“So what do they do with our pots?”

Brooke hesitated. All of Vera’s employees’ hard work was purposeless. Yet the woman had suffered too much to be denied the
truth. “Since Russian raw material is worth a lot more in Europe’s open market than the finished product, once your pots and bowls reach their destination, they are probably melted down. The nickel and copper are then sold at a huge profit. The money, in foreign denominations, is probably tucked away in an offshore bank account.”

“
Offshorsky.
We’ve already adopted the word.” Olga shook her head.

Brooke sat back. A new apprehension filled her head. “These smugglers are not fools. They know what they’re doing,” she told Olga. “Vera’s up against an international crime cartel whose business practices must be as sophisticated as Coca-Cola and IBM put together.”

A
S THEY TRAMPED
their way back, Brooke’s mouth tasted metallic. Frogs burped somewhere in the darkness. When the women rounded the corner, wind whipped down at them from the open fields to the north. Brooke removed her cashmere shawl and placed it over Olga’s coat. “Keep it.”

Olga fingered the fine wool. “It’s too elegant. You’ve given me an expensive gift already. I can’t take this—”

Brooke tucked her hands in her coat pockets for warmth. “You’ve given me a far more precious gift.”

“What’s that?”

Emotions rippled through Brooke, too complex to define. How could she begin to explain that seeing the misfortune and courage with which Russian women faced life finally made her grasp the magnitude of her parents’ survival?

As though she’d read her mind, Olga’s cold fingers laced into
Brooke’s. “Only our stories are different. Not what they represent to us.”

“My story is still different from most Americans’.” Brooke bit her lower lip. “My mother was born in Russia. She is Jewish. Her sister was murdered in a pogrom. Afterward, the family escaped to Riga, but later ended up in a concentration camp. She survived, but her entire family was murdered before and during the war.” She continued to speak as they reached the shelter of Olga’s stairwell, where they stood in darkness. “In my childhood, the Holocaust was always present by the void of what was gone. I grew up without grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. My parents were too old and too beaten to produce more than one child, so I had no living siblings, only the ghosts of three murdered ones. I was given an impossible legacy of responsibility, one I tried to escape my entire life.”

“What sort of responsibility?”

“To never forget.”

“I am so sorry to hear about your family tragedies.” Olga lit a cigarette, and Brooke tried to read her face in the flicker of the lighter. Olga’s brows were squeezed together. “We were horrible to our Jews. For centuries we stored up deadly hatred against them. Our priests gave us permission to rob them, to ridicule them, to beat them, to kill them—all under the premise of vindicating their killing our Jesus. Where was the goodness and compassion and Christian charity the priests were also telling us about? Shamelessly, we were the oppressors and the persecutors of the Jews in our midst.”

Brooke felt the hair rising on her arms. She had never imag
ined she’d be facing one of “them,” and certainly not one who confessed. “You say ‘we,’ yet you distance yourself from it—”

Olga cut her off. “It’s our collective guilt—and it should be our collective shame—except that it is not.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Even under communism we let minorities thrive and maintain their cultural identity, but we continued to persecute your people. We closed their synagogues and shut down their newspapers. Yet, when the Jews wanted to leave, we forbade it. We only tightened the noose on their necks.”

Was Olga asking for Brooke’s forgiveness? It wasn’t hers to give. “How much of it have you witnessed yourself?” Brooke asked.

“I grew up with it. I am guilty both collectively and personally. My family was friends with our Jewish neighbors. I had liked Mrs. Horvitz’s cooking. She was kind to me. I was only three or four years old when, one night, I heard a lot of shouting outside and noise of banging and breaking glass. Then my mother brought in down-feather quilts, and I saw from the window my older brothers lead the Horvitzes’ cow and horse to our barn. I asked where the Horvitzes went without their horse, and was told they ran away by foot. In the morning, I received the wool coat of their daughter, who was a few years older than me. All winter I worried about her being cold somewhere, but then I too, forgot.” Olga pressed the light switch, as if wanting Brooke to take a full measure of her culpability. “With alterations, the coat served me for years.” She tapped her cigarette, and the feathered ashes fell to the floor. “When the war ended, Mr. Horvitz came back to town—alone. A neighbor who had worked for him had
taken over his home and business. He stabbed Mr. Horvitz with a pitch fork in front of my eyes.”

Brooke couldn’t find words and anyway wouldn’t have been able to get them through the contracted passage of her throat.

Olga went on, “I was older then and was both ashamed and horrified. My parents told me that the Horvitzes weren’t worth getting upset about, but I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I knew that my parents were wrong, and this knowledge was my first awakening into adulthood and independent thinking. I understood that it wasn’t just hate. It was greed, even envy. I never saw a Jew again until I went to university, and even there, we were jealous of them because they were so smart that if our academic institutions hadn’t limited their enrollment, there would have been too many Jewish students and then Jewish professors churning out Jewish graduates that would qualify for the best jobs. Universities that were supposed to be the temple of knowledge, open thinking, and academic achievement were scared of the Jews’ intellectual powers.”

When Brooke said nothing, Olga sighed. “So you see, I was complicit, if not active, in horrific acts against your people. Maybe today a more clever Jewish woman would have been director of the Institute of Social Research. Perhaps I’ve benefited from the vengeance we unleashed upon our Jews with more than just a coat.”

“Your honesty alone must redeem you,” Brooke managed to say. But who was she to forgive transgressions committed against others?

“Redeemed in whose eyes? The Lord? Our priests told us that He punished His Chosen People for killing His son, Jesus.”
Olga drew in a rough breath. “Just so you know, I don’t believe the priests—most of them are greedy and corrupt—but I believe in the Lord, and I still don’t understand why He let down your people.”

“You sound like my mother. She won’t talk to Him until He asks the Jews for forgiveness.” Brooke swallowed. “Thank you for admitting all that. It takes courage.”

“It takes courage to flaunt your being a Jewess. No one in Russia would wear that.” Olga pointed to the Star of David.

“It’s because of my mother that I must go home.” Olga’s confession, the honesty of it, had both chipped at Brooke’s resolve and reinforced it. She admired Olga even more than before, but also there was no doubt that she was in the wrong place.