Snow in May: Stories (2 page)

“Sergeich!” Pea Soup hollered. “How many times do I have to tell you that pets are not allowed in the common areas?”

The communal kitchen contained five ovens, five tables, several standing and hanging cupboards, most of them with locks on their doors, and a sea of kitchenware occupying every available surface and wall. The entire space was segmented by bedsheets, towels, and various other laundry articles hanging to dry from a network of ropes. An invisible radio babbled the news. The smells of fried onions, pea soup, and fish fought for airspace. A beautiful young woman with curlers in her bleached hair flew into the kitchen, chirped hello to Auntie Roza, and carried away a whistling kettle.

Auntie Roza turned on the gas and struck a match. “Now tell me what happened, Tanechka.”

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.