Hotel Moscow (31 page)

M
OUNTING THE STAIRS
from the tarmac, Brooke stopped before entering the plane and turned her head for a last glance at Moscow’s sky. A flock of ravens floated above. The last time she had seen ravens, less than a week before, she was fleeing the Gorbachevskaya Street Factory. She had thought then that that had been the worst scene she could ever witness.

Svetlana had been shocked by the news of Olga’s death. Her Russian passport had allowed her fast process, and she had rushed onto the plane with Natasha.

Brooke settled into her window seat and placed her Walkman in the pocket in front of her along with the copies of
Business Week
and
Fortune
she hadn’t opened all week. From across the aisle, she watched as Svetlana bravely steadied herself in front of her daughter, and Natasha accepted with delight a coloring book the flight attendant handed her. Brooke sent Svetlana a tight, sad smile over the child’s head. She adjusted a pillow and lay her
head back. Judd stowed his bag in the compartment above, sat down next to her, and took her hand. This time she let him.

After takeoff she asked, “Do you believe in life after death? Do you believe it when people claim they sense a dead person’s presence?”

“The friends I lost in Vietnam just died.”

“I feel Olga is close by.” The awareness of it shocked Brooke. “I can’t let it end this way. I don’t want Olga’s death to be for naught.” She looked out the window. The sky above the clouds was bright and clear. She mulled over Olga’s candor, her owning up to the collective guilt and shame, her facing uncomfortable truths about her family and her village. Olga had the courage to assume guilt for actions she had not committed. Perhaps it was time for Brooke to own up to her own momentous mistakes.

“Judd, what I told you earlier was only the second part of a long, ugly story.” She halted, the words stuck in her windpipe.

“I’m listening.” He brought up her hand and planted a kiss at the base of her palm.

She hesitated, and then the words rushed out. “I went to Berkeley at seventeen and lived in a commune. Seven months after it broke up, when I was a sophomore, I gave birth to a baby. They told me it was a girl, and I insisted that she be adopted by a Jewish family. This way at least, my role in perpetuating our tribe wasn’t wasted.”

Without speaking, Judd kissed each finger. His face was close to hers. He raised his face, and his lips sought hers.

The kiss took her breath away. “Thank you for not judging me,” she whispered.

“But I do. And I find you an amazingly accomplished woman who’s gone through a lot but never allowed it to defeat you.”

“Don’t we have to be strong and successful to show the
goyim
?”

He smiled. “As good a motivation as any.”

“I did the other thing, the posing, to make up for the scholarship I lost while I was having the baby. I was depressed. My hormones were raging. There was no way to jump out of my skin and escape my misery. All I knew was that I had to pull out of the muck. And, of course, my parents could never know.”

“That makes you all the more compassionate toward other women.”

She stared into the void of the sky. “When Amanda suggested this trip, I thought I’d learn something about the new economy that would give me a leg up at the firm after the takeover. At best, I would collect some brownie points for next Yom Kippur. But now the joke’s on me. I got emotionally tangled in the plight of the women I’ve met.” She took a deep breath. “But the greater surprise for me is finding my Jewishness. I always brushed away anti-Semitism because I didn’t want it to exist. It’s easy to be liberal in New York, to consider prejudice a non-issue.” She looked into his face. “How do you deal with anti-Semitism here?”

He took her hand in his again. “I try to ignore it, but it still hurts to be hated so much—and for reasons that never make sense.”

“I don’t want to be defined by it any more than I wanted to be defined by the Holocaust. I want my Judaism to be my choice—a spiritual me—not dictated by others’ misguided view of me.”

“Well, you fix the world as we’re commanded to do,” Judd said.

“I try to, but not very successfully.” Brooke glanced in Svetlana’s direction. The young woman had fallen asleep with Natasha’s head in her lap, the girl talking softly to her stuffed rabbit. Svetlana’s comments had merely represented the voice of millions of other Russians. “I hate to admit it, but anti-Semitism has brought to the surface my pride in being Jewish.” She chuckled. “I love my DNA.”

For a while, neither spoke. An air of understanding—rare, comfortable—stirred between them.

It was time she stopped running away from it all and confronted her mistakes. Brooke reached for the envelope. A cardboard piece kept the papers inside from bending. She put it down again, afraid to look.

Olga would have had the courage, she thought. Angling herself toward the window away from Judd, she turned the broken flap of the envelope and slowly pulled out the contents.

There was only one photo, and it stared at her: a light-skinned black woman in a graduation cap and gown. Brooke peeked again in the envelope. Where were the nude pictures? She checked the envelope again, as if someone had made a mistake. There was only a folded sheet of paper. No. Two full lined pages, written by hand in blue ink. She turned the photo over. On the back was written, “To Brooke, from Sage.”

“Sage?” she murmured, disbelieving. Sage? They’d kept the name she had put on the adoption papers.

She turned the photograph over again. The young woman
peering at her had magnificently high cheekbones. The wide eyes were sprinkled with hazel. She was beautiful.

“Sage,” Brooke whispered again. With trembling fingers, she unfolded the letter.

    
Dear Brooke,

                          
Although I often fantasized about what my birth mother was like, I wasn’t looking for her. I have wonderful parents and two adopted siblings: a sister who is three years younger, and a brother who is only eight years old.

                          
In preparation for my graduation from Reed College as a business major with an interest in finance (I’ve managed to graduate in three years instead of four with a grade point average of 4.0), I began looking for a job with an investment firm. I want to gain experience for a couple of years before applying to graduate school.

                          
My mom once told me that all she knew about my birth mother was that she had been a student by the name of Brooke who grew up out East, and that she had wanted me placed with a Jewish family. I concluded long ago that my birth mother must have been white, but that wasn’t much to go by if I tried to find her.

                          
If you are my mother, and if I am like you, you can understand how thorough I was in my job search. As I researched the top thirty investment companies in
New York City, the financial capital of the world, I was astonished to come across in Norton, Hills, and Bridwell’s annual report a woman named Brooke Fielding. I know it’s crazy, but I found at the library a
Business Week
interview with a picture of you standing in your office, and I learned your age and that you had graduated from Berkeley. It all fit, but was still unrealistic.

                          
After some deliberation with myself (do you also use big words?) I asked my parents’ permission to contact the adoption agency. They are okay with my search for my birth mother. The agency representative would not confirm anything, but said that she would contact whoever was the right woman, if she were still alive. I left this letter and photograph with her and told her that if indeed you’re my birth mother, she should send them directly.

                          
What am I like? Probably a typical twenty-year-old, right down to my love of pop music and the suffering over boys. (I don’t have a boyfriend right now.) I love dancing, and while in high school I belonged to a performing jazz troupe. I’m a bit more serious than my friends, though. I volunteer at a nursing home one afternoon a week, and since high school, I’ve been a Big Sister to a girl from a troubled home. She’s doing great. Do you do volunteer work, too? It’s okay if you don’t; you are such a busy executive, you may not have any free time.

                          
If you receive this letter and still decide that you
don’t want to meet me, I’ll try to understand, although I can’t say that I won’t be disappointed. The
Business Week
interview printed nothing about your personal life. Maybe you’re married, have a couple of kids, and no one knows about me. I don’t wish to break your life apart. But maybe you’ll be willing to answer the million questions that buzz through my mind when I think of the woman who couldn’t raise me. I hope that you’ll respond, if only this once. (I know I’m supposed to ask for medical history, but that is only a cover for what I really want to know about you.)

                          
As I said, if you decide you don’t want to meet me, I promise to keep my distance, but I will always be proud that a woman of such accomplishments may be my birth mother.

With admiration and warmest regards,

Sage

(206) 555-1212

Crying, Brooke reread the letter. The incredulity of it all spread through her, filling her with happiness and sadness at the same time. “Sage,” she murmured the name of her daughter, “Sage.” Her tears dripped on the photograph she tried to study but could no longer see. She touched the sleek, cold paper and broke into a sob.

Judd, who had been playing with Natasha across the aisle to give Brooke privacy, turned to look at her. Without attempting to wipe her tears, she lifted the letter toward him. This was the
biggest moment of her life, the rebirth of her child—and in some way, of herself.

When Judd finished reading the letter, he pulled her as close as the tight space would allow and planted little kisses on her head.

“How selfish it was for me to imagine that these were the nude photos haunting me,” Brooke cried. “Why didn’t I wonder whether my daughter, who was now twenty, would search for me?”

“Why, really?”

A sad smile crept up her face. “I thought I was undeserving of happiness.”

He kissed her again. “You’ll have plenty from now on,” he whispered.

She lowered her head to look at the photograph again.

“Well, what’s the first thing you’ll do when we land in Frankfurt?” he asked.

“Call her.” She laid her head on his shoulder and listened to his breathing. “The timing of it all. One loss, one gain.”

“Sage sounds like the kind of woman who may love to continue Olga’s unfinished business,” he said. “She doesn’t carry your Holocaust
mishegas
.”

“I don’t know about that. Russia is such a dangerous place—and she is Jewish, after all.”

He laughed. “Maternal instinct already kicking in? You’ll do all right.”

Her eyes were fixed on a pencil-thin gray light on the horizon that bifurcated the sky into two worlds, one above, one below. The top tier melted into the farthest reaches of the universe.

It all came together; it became one. Whole.

Glossary

Note: Russian words used in the novel are transliterated to the closest English-speaking pronunciation.

avoska
—string basket

Bozhe moi
—My God

chort
—a curse

dezhurnayia
—hotel matron

demokratia
—democracy

keep-ya-tok (=kipyatok)
—boiling water

Khrushchoby
—Khrushchev’s slums

krestniy otets
—Russian godfathers

krysha
—private security unit

leemon
—lemon

mannaya kasha
—semolina porridge

nichevo
—never mind, not important

normalno
—normal

offshorsky
—offshore

pizda
—cunt

po gblatu
—connections, in accordance with
blut

proshchaniye
—farewell

Rossiya
—Russians’ pronunciation of
Russia

sidyet
—a “sitting” job

slozhno
—complicated, exhausting

spasiba
—thank you

tabletka
—a pill, a capsule

uzhasno
—terrible

vanna
—a large laundry tub

vkusno
—yummy

yob tvoyu mat
—a curse

zhaba
—a toad

Acknowledgments

To the hundreds of nameless Russian women in Moscow and St. Petersburg who listened to my presentations, attended my workshops, or sought my one-on-one counseling: Only teachers who touch other people’s lives can understand how much you gave me in return.

To my closest friend, my lifelong gift, Bina Shif Rattenbach, and especially to her late mother, “Tusha” Eibschutz Shif, who told me so much about Nazi concentration camps, yet left unspoken spaces shrouded in shadows. To many other childhood friends in Tel-Aviv who are second-generation Holocaust survivors: I watched you and your parents as a child but only processed what I had seen and heard much later as an adult.

To the American Jews who similarly grew up in the shadows of the Holocaust, both friends and strangers, who initiated confessions to me because they sensed that I would understand: Please know that I listened.

To Sasha Chalif, founder of The Alliance of Russian and American Women, who organized a “citizen mission” in May 1993—my first journey into the lives of Russian women—and
to journalist Rosalind McLymont, whose inspiring, flowery speeches matched those given by our Russian hostesses.

There is no one to thank at the U.S. Information Agency, now defunct, that sent me on my second trip to Russia that same year, in late September 1993. However, besides the dozens of women I met and whose hugs I still remember, there are David Kennedy Hunter, then at Moscow’s American Embassy, and former U.S. Congressman Gary Ackerman, who helped me leave in haste after the uprising of the parliament against President Boris Yeltsin had run its course.

Most of my research was done in 1994, when trying to make sense of the chaotic events in which I had been caught, starting with my interviewing former U.S. and Russian security personnel. They were instrumental in giving me the lay of the land when little published material was yet available: Richard S., National Security Agency; Donna M., Central Intelligence Agency; and Anatoly G., former K.G.B. Businessmen Ury K. and Benjamin D. explained the convoluted Russian international trading practices, and architects Gerry B. and Robert S. gave me photo tours of communal apartments situated in former Czar-era mansions that they began renovating for a new class of rich Russian oligarchs.

Beyond the mountains of information parted by these professionals, there were the dozen former Soviet Union citizens, who were finally free in the United States and Israel to speak and share their stories, giving my story literary texture and depth. At that time, the late author Bel Kaufman (
Up t
he Down Staircase
) added her perspective of Jewish–Russian history.

More recently, as I reshaped the material into a novel, editor
Rebecca Stowe’s sure-footed guidance was followed by talented writing buddies with red pens: Susan O’Neill and Victor Rangel-Ribeiro. Joining them with constructive suggestions was my writing group, Two Bridges, administered by Walter Cummins. Thanks, too, to Ada Samuelson for correcting my transliteration of Russian words.

Moving a manuscript from the bowels of my computer to the light of day is the triumph of my insightful literary agent, Marly Rusoff, and my brilliant editor at William Morrow, Katherine Nintzel. Kate and her talented team at HarperCollins/William Morrow—Jennifer Hart, Marguerite Weisman, Molly Birckhead, Shelby Meizlik, and Megan Schumann—wove behind-the-scenes magic and midwifed this novel into the world of readers.

And underpinning my literary and feminist endeavors there is always my Ron: You keep showing me by example how fulfilling a life devoted to causes can be, while the ocean of your love allows me to ladle into my fountain of creativity.