Parachutes and Kisses (59 page)

Alley cats crossed her path, and scrawny dogs followed her for a while, seeking scraps. She had none to give them. Her trek continued as the sky grew lighter and lighter blue. Finally, she was led, as if by an invisible string, to a battered four-story house on a narrow street (where vegetable refuse and animal offal lined the gutters and two mongrels fought over a bone in the street).

She looked up. On the fourth floor, one lone blue window had a flickering bluish light. A young man with bushy black hair, a bulbous nose, and a droopy mustache came to the window. Did she only imagine it or was he carrying an oblong wooden palette in one hand and a bouquet of brushes in the other? But he had to be at least twenty-five and Papa had left Russia eleven years before that birthday. As she watched, the youthful figure in the window turned into a fretful, stolid householder of forty, a pink-cheeked man of seventy, and finally a bent, pale wraith of ninety-seven with an open fly and his underwear showing under his jacket.

A baby cried mournfully in the night. Dogs growled. A man and woman shouted, somewhere, then began to make noisy love. She realized she was almost ninety-nine years too late for
everything;
he had already been born, grown up, grown old, died. (But that was only assuming time existed.)

“Papa?” she called to the fading figure in the window, who now vanished, taking with him the house, the street, the baby, the lovers, the dogs, the refuse, the offal, and also the chill. Bluish streets beckoned her back past a market already bustling with life. Under the onion domes, she undressed and went back to bed. She slept the sleep of the dead, dreamless and deep.

 

In the morning, she and Glotarchuk had sweet rolls and
chai.

“Well—shall we search for your grandfather today?” he asked, as if he did not know her notebooks were gone, as if he were innocent of everything.

“I think I may have already found him,” Isadora said.

She, Glotarchuk, and Mikhail Berezny returned to the Odessa market, where, under metal canopies, huge peasant women in babushkas were weighing out buckets of sour cherries, sweet apricots, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, peppers. The women had faces as wrinkled as maps of the moon: with their hard and glittering eyes, they seemed almost sibylline as they weighed the shining fruit, and their dangling old-fashioned earrings bobbed and danced from their long earlobes. There would be another week in Odessa, another week in Leningrad and Moscow, art treasures to see, Pushkin's house, Tolstoy's house—but Isadora already knew what she needed to know. She understood that she was not Russian, but American, and that she was rooted not in Odessa, but in her own soul. She knew that lost notebooks didn't really matter, nor lost paintings nor lost manuscripts; that we pass the torch along through human flesh; through our lusts, our loves, the poetry of our daily existence. How vain we are to think anything else is more than a dream! Even our ancestors are dreams, created to explain us to our own selves. She knew she was not her grandfather's shadow, but herself: the creation and the creator both, the poem and the poet, the written and the spoken voice—both in one body that was destined to die.

Can one then have the heart, the impudence to visit Venice? Is that the reason Proust would never go? For against this, if it might be too hot by day or the stench then too great, by contrast it would seem only too easy to set out by moonlight so that no couple, if given the miraculous chance, could fail, intent on their two selves, to sink Venice, as can be done tomorrow by the Gondola covering a moonlight lane of sea. Yet to leave her thus is but to come back to bed in Venice.

—HENRY GREEN

It is my intention to remain at Venice over the Winter, probably as it has always been (next to the East) the greenest island of my imagination. It has not disappointed me.... I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation.

—BYRON

SOMEHOW,
she got out of Russia. Somehow she got through the endless days with Glotarchuk, the endless days without Amanda and Bean, the travesty of having to share the white nights of Leningrad with the dread Glotarchuk, the absurdity of sharing Pushkin's house and dueling site with this ghastly Soviet Gradgrind.

She remembers walking along the luminous Neva embankment with him at midnight, wishing for Bean, thinking of Bean, feeling Bean in her fingers and toes, her cunt and her womb.

Leningrad was the most beautiful city she had ever seen. The Neva outshone the Dnieper, the silver Seine, the glorious Thames, the glittering Arno, the dappled Danube, the fabled Neckar of Heidelberg, and the majestic Hudson (on whose shores she was born). From river to palaces, from palaces to parks, nothing about Leningrad was overrated—not the White Nights, nor the Golden Treasury of the Hermitage, not Pushkin's dueling site, nor the Haymarket, where
Crime and Punishment
is set, not the Neva Embankment itself, with its pale pewter paving stones, its low golden palaces, its luminescent light (combining the best of Paris light, Copenhagen light, Amsterdam light in one northern sky), its glorious Winter Palace, lying low, green, and columnar beneath astounding river clouds, not its art treasures, nor its kvass trucks (around which people group, boisterously drinking), nor its leafy verdant parks where statues stand.

Yet all of Leningrad was somewhat spoiled for her by the anxiety about tickets home, by the constant companionship of stolid, stolidest, stolidisimma Glotarchuk, and by her creeping sense (which grew with every day in the USSR) that here was a society as sinister, as subtly devastating to the soul, as anything Kafka had created.

She never knew whether her notebooks had been stolen or, if so, by whom. She imagined that someone in the Soviet state did not want her to meet her Russian relatives (if they were alive) or discover they were dead (if they were dead). What these putative relatives could have told her, she did not know—nor, probably, did the Russians. They withheld the information, most likely, by pure reflex. All information is, by definition, to be withheld—for information is a means to freedom. “Liberty,” said Camus, “is the right not to lie.” He also might have said: “Liberty is the right to information, to notebooks, to addresses.”
Droit de cahiers,
one might call it, as strong as
droit moral.

True, her government had shredded documents, had perpetrated Watergate, had killed Vietnamese, had interned Japanese-Americans, had supported hideous bloodthirsty regimes in Salvador, and points south, but even these atrocities were balanced by a degree of domestic freedom unknown in the whole rest of the world. If Papa could have seen Soviet Russia, he would have given up even the last, lingering vestiges of his Marxism—as indeed most
Soviet
Russians had. But he left the country before the twentieth century even dawned, and all he knew of communism was from books. As he painted in Paris, in Edinburgh, in London, in New York, he dreamed of a Marxism which never came to pass—except in theory—and the proof of whose pudding he'd never tasted.

The Writers' Union had not wanted to let her out of Russia. She waited day after day at the old, regal Sovietskaya Hotel in Moscow while various officials debated her fate. Finally she broke down and wept to one of the round motherly ladies of the Writers' Union (which seemed to specialize in round, motherly ladies)—a red-ringleted translator of English and American poetry (with several wens on her face and large buck teeth).

“I am in love,” Isadora said, weeping, “and I must meet my lover in Venice; then I must meet my daughter at home. Please see what you can do about the tickets.”

In Russia, love and children are still sacred abstractions and tears are potent as vodka. The translator lady, Larissa Yahupova, began to weep herself.

“I have read your grandfather poems,” she said, “And I know you have great heart.” Those same poems were still her passports home—as they had been her passports here!

Miraculously, the tickets arrived. Miraculously, Larissa Yahupova brought her to the airport. Miraculously, the Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Milan awaited. Miraculously, she was allowed to board the plane (though not without the usual confusion and delay).

All she could think of was the fictional Henry Bech, alter ego of Updike in his nostalgic, literary yearning for
yiddishkeit,
as she tried to think of what to do with all the rubles she had collected from Writers' Union welcoming committees in four cities, but had never had any place to spend. The
beriozkas
(gift shops) were always closed, it seemed, when she had a moment to frequent them. All her expenses were paid in each city. And leaving Moscow she was held up for $312 (in American money only, please), supposedly for overweight luggage. Her luggage was underweight, she wanted to protest—(her notebooks had been stolen)—but of course she did no such thing. In every city she visited, she had been heaped with heavy gift books, art books, autographed poetry books, so perhaps her luggage
was
overweight. All that Russian poetry weighed a ton. Ah—when she got home, she was going to start studying Russian at once.

What to do with the rubles? She had consolidated them all into one envelope and they made a damp, thick packet. She wanted to toss it in the garbage, but she was afraid somebody would see and think it her comment on the Soviet state. She held the wad of rubles in her pocket, terrified of the consequences of throwing it away, and of the consequences of carrying it out of the country. She was paralyzed.

Two weeks in Russia had reduced her to a quivering mass of anxieties about the most simple, ordinary tasks. The fantasy of being under constant surveillance was perhaps a more potent force for control than the
reality
of being under surveillance. It was illegal to carry Soviet money out of the country (Larissa had warned her before hurrying to her mysterious duties at the Writers' Union, leaving Isadora to wait for the plane alone), even though the currency was nonconvertible—and it was probably some kind of crime against the state to throw it in the garbage.

She paced about the airport, waiting for the flight to Milan to be called, the wet wad of rubles seeming to show through her pocket as through a fluoroscope screen. She considered going up and giving it to a policeman—but then she thought that maybe she could be arrested for that, as if it might be misconstrued as bribery. (But bribery for what? Her mind was not functioning rationally; her paranoia was rampant.) Suddenly her flight was called. She went to the designated gate, marked with the correct number of the flight to Milan, and for some time she waited in a long line. But after waiting there for quite a while, she chanced to ask the only English-speaking person on line and she realized that the flight she was waiting for was bound for Odessa! (Did they now want her back in Odessa? And if so, why?)

She ran around wildly, shlepping her heavy book bag until she saw, waiting at another, unmarked gate, a tour group of elderly Italians (she could tell by their beautiful shoes, their brown-tinted glasses, their friendly, extroverted ways that they were Italians even before she got close enough to hear
la belle lingua).
She asked one of
them
where they were headed.

“Milano,” came the reply from a sweet gray-haired lady who, it turned out, was as eager to leave Russia as she.

“Quel buona fortuna!”
said Isadora. And then, in the pure bliss of being immersed in a sea of Italian, she began to quote—out of the mists of her freshman year at Barnard, the first canto of
La Divina Commedia:

“Lei parla Italiana!”
the lady exclaimed with that true joy which is one of the great delights of studying Italian (the inverse of the humiliation of learning French—for in France speaking French badly is as big a sin as speaking Italian badly is a virtue in Italy).

“Ah, signorina,”
said the lady, taking Isadora back, back, back to her student days in Italy (where she looked so young she was always
signorina,
never
signora)
...
“Ah, signorina
—
la Russia a me non piace. Andiamo insieme all Italia!”

Isadora couldn't have agreed more. They waited on line for the plane—the right line—chatting happily in Italian of the joy of leaving Russia. But even as they spoke, Isadora wondered whether they mightn't be overheard and arrested. And she still fingered the damp rubles, wondering what to do.

Why had Larissa Yahupova scurried back to the Writers' Union and left her in this predicament? If she were Henry Bech—or any male author, real or fictitious—she would have had a whole
committee
bidding her farewell, as she had had a committee welcoming her, when she traveled with the delegation. But no, she had been left to fend for herself. Suddenly the gate opened up and the flight to Milan was boarding.

What to do with the rubles? Bech had tossed them insouciantly onto the runway in a crumpled ball. What a free spirit! Clearly he had not been as terrified in Russia as Isadora. His terror lurked elsewhere—in the Deep South perhaps, or Israel.

On boarding, Isadora summoned up the courage to offer the rubles to a stewardess. The stewardess declined. (Would she also call the police and have Isadora dragged from the plane like a disorderly drunk and locked in a Russian dungeon forever?) Isadora briskly walked to the back of the aircraft where the lavatory was and carefully closed the door. After looking around for hidden cameras, she stuffed all the rubles in the garbage can, and covered them with brownish paper towels. Still, she was fearful of arrest—but what else could she do? It was already time to fasten seatbelts. She went to her seat and sat down.