Stalina (18 page)

I spoke to my mother on the way down in the elevator. “Thank you, Mother, for the amusing show. Your ashes went out to sea over the rooftops of Brooklyn. Now you cover half the globe. It’s better that we sent you out to sea; otherwise you’d be trapped in that apartment with the Chernovskys. The urn, your ashes—what a mess you made all over their fancy-schmancy furniture. It was all very amusing.”

I could see my mother nodding her head in agreement. Whenever she acknowledged something, she would close her eyes as if to trap it in her soul. My mother liked to hold on to things. Hate, ribbons, Stalin, and her wedding ring. Being a mother was the only thing she could not hold on to. Hers was a cold distance she never learned to control. After the siege, she was simply waiting, for a strong cup of tea, for Stalin’s henchmen to take my father, for me to leave, and for death. She was always far away. I pulled the photograph out of my bag and looked at it once more, feeling slightly woozy from the whole encounter, or maybe it was just because the elevator wobbled on its way down to the lobby.

Outside on Neptune Avenue, the wind greeted me like a wall. I leaned into it and walked as if climbing the Altai Mountains. I grabbed my collar and pulled my coat closed. Breathing in the salted, slanted air put a big sting in my lungs that reminded me of home.

St. Petersburg, the name of the bookstore, was scrawled in red neon script above the door like a ribbon of candy. It was a market of videos, magazines, music, and books. A feast from home for an immigrant tourist like myself. There were hundreds of romance and science fiction novels. Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov were carefully placed for good measure on the narrow, crowded shelves in between the smooth, hard plastic covers. So many, many books. The splashy covers and rough parchment pages were a trip home for my hands and eyes. The Cyrillic letters were like fireworks dancing in front of me. I grabbed a book off the shelf. The cover had an astronaut in the foreground and a blond female alien floating in space behind him. I opened the book to page one and read.

Romance and space travel—how Russian of you, dear author. I’d buy the sequel also,
Alien Children of the Asteroid’s Moon
. Procreation in space—this should make for fascinating reading. In the store’s video section they had
Krokodil
, our famous puppet cartoon.
Krokodil Takes a Trip by Train
. I’d bring it as a gift to Nadia for letting me have the day off. Good-bye, Brighton Beach. Next time I’d have the meringue with chocolate and walnuts.

The subway rumbled back from the end of its line while the sunlight flickered a little through the tracks and Brighton Avenue was pulled away from me. The light flashed along the tops of babushkas’ heads. Women becoming blonds in the beauty salons closed their eyes as the train went past and the fading Cyrillic lettering on the walls disappeared. My eyes were pulsing to the speeding landscape as I went back into the beast and held tight, waiting to be put out at Port Authority and Forty-second Street.

Inside the terminal a man was playing a banjo under a poster of the Statue of Liberty. I would have to save my visit to that torch-wielding lady for another time. The strain of the metal strings vibrated off the steel girders and made the air sweeter. My hips swayed with the beat. I was happy.

“That’s right, mama, you move those big ol’ scrumptious hips. I’ll keep playin’ for ya,” the musician said with a big smile flashing a gold tooth.

He quickened his rhythm. I sashayed over to his money hat and threw in a dollar.

“You dance like an angel, mama! God is going to want you for his own, but right now I’m glad you’re here on earth in the blessed Port Authori-tay!”

“Moscow, Kennedy, Port Authori-tay!” I sang back to him as I made my way outside.

“A world traveler, oh my, my, my!” I heard him sing as I went through the doors.

I wanted a taste of the city once more before getting on the bus. The streets were torn up with huge, gaping holes. Men were working down below. I had seen them years before. Their yellow hard hats still bobbed up and down as buses and cars rumbled past. They looked like residents of a new sub-level city, added to accommodate the masses. I thought of Frederica the palm reader and wanted to see her to tell her how accurate her prediction of betrayal had been. I also thought it would be helpful to have her tell me something else about my future. But when I turned the corner, I saw that her storefront was gone. Only a big, gaping hole remained, empty and blackened like a tooth pulled from a giant’s lower jaw. The Christ Almighty Church was still standing, but its side wall was now exposed. There was an advertisement on the wall. The faded letters read:

Dancers

All Shapes & Sizes

Men

Come to

“A Cheap Way to Heaven”

Five Cents

for Six Minutes

Right Around

the Corner

The words were transparent like clouds disappearing into a mountainside. A church wall advertising a peep show? I would expect that in Russia, but here in New York, it was a welcome sight for me. It was almost like a poem, and it made me feel even more at home. A Cheap Way to Heaven was still there, but the sign above their door said “Fifty Cents a Minute.” I wondered what would happen if I raised the rates at the Liberty. The cost of linens had recently gone up.

On a fence where Frederica’s storefront had been, a sign read, “Site of Bank of America’s Midtown Branch.” Frederica’s crystal ball was nowhere to be seen. What a shame, this city changed almost as fast as the ruble.

The Liberty Motel in Berlin, Connecticut, was now my home. I’d be going home now. With my mother’s revenge complete, I was free to go. I’d be glad to leave this city. It was so dirty. No one here bent over to pick up their trash. The garbage stayed where it was dropped and became part of the scenery. Amalia’s son, Alexi, told me why this was so.

“It’s very American,” he explained one morning in the kitchen when I asked him why people threw their garbage out car windows.

Alexi at sixteen had embraced the American luxuries of boredom, disdain for adults, a passion for privacy, and everything disposable. But he would still do anything his mother asked, even steal, and with that he remained Russian.

“It’s someone’s job. They get paid to pick up after us,” he added, leaving for school with his shirttails hanging out.

*  *  *

The buses waiting to depart from the bowels of Port Authority were like fidgeting horses with their rears swaying in impatience to be fed. The front seat with the picture window next to the driver afforded the best view, and as I was first in line, this place of privilege was mine. The bus left the city out the back end of Port Authority. These back-streets were dark and deserted even with the last pieces of sunlight holding onto the sky between the buildings. The few people we passed on the street looked up at the bus as if they yearned to leave the city, too. The alleys felt like places where secrets are kept.

Stopped at a light before we entered the tunnel, my question about Frederica’s whereabouts was answered. A folding table with a crystal ball was set up in front of a building, and there she sat in the same white plastic chair, looking at the split ends in her freshly dyed blond hair. She was taking advantage of a little bit of sunlight bouncing off a window across the street in the brief moment that it was touching her. The bus pushed forward a few inches, cutting off Frederica’s light like a prison door slamming shut. She looked up at the bus, the thief of her light. In my bag I found the picture of my parents I had showed her more than two years ago and held it up to the window. Her eyes squinted to see me and the photograph. As the bus pulled away, recognition came to her face. She pointed to her eye as if she wanted me to see something. Then she pointed behind her back. I turned around, and in the seat directly behind me was an old woman, near in age to my mother, wearing a lemon yellow sweater and a lime green beret with a rhinestone pin that said “I Heart NY.” I looked back out at the nodding Frederica and then to the old woman whose big, broad smile was exaggerated by pink lipstick applied thickly and sloppily over the edges of her lips. Everything around her, even the deserted streets, suddenly felt carefree and filled with possibility. Frederica flashed me a crooked purple smile, and just as the bus entered the tunnel, she disappeared. The old woman yawned loudly, and I sat back and thanked New York for offering me such hope and humor.

As the bus moved in a northwesterly direction, an intoxicating vista unfolded. Blurring signposts, rail guards, and trees along the highway flashed by as the white lines disappeared underneath the bus and the burning sunset on the driver’s horizon gave way to an idea for a new room design. My eyes went dream hazy and I envisioned the “Highway to Heaven Room,” or room number three. This new room would take my customers’ fantasies to a spectacular place. A vibrating “mobile-a-bed” would transport them with top-down convertible style into a perpetually changing and mesmerizing sunset. The wheels of the car would be textured with fleece and the interior lined with satin. It would have a fur-covered steering wheel, and the back seat would be wide enough for a picnic. There would be vanity mirrors everywhere, and the radio would play whatever station you chose. Regulation seat belts, of course. The sunset machine, a multicolored rotating light, would be timed for the length of your stay. I have always found bus rides in America inspiring.

I like to relax in what was Mr. Suri’s favorite heart-shaped tub after a day of serving the needs of my customers. The Liberty Motel can be a wonderful, playful, euphoric place, but it also can be a place of fierce battles and casualties. In any case, every day is a long day, and I look forward to a relaxing, steamy bubble bath. Today while cleaning out the front desk I found a note I never sent to the parents of one of our casualties in the war of love.

This was a few years ago. A pair of teenage lovers went the way of Romeo and Juliet. They left a note that said, “We love this room and each other very much. Good-bye.” I sent this note through the police to the families. I hope they are glad to have something from their loved ones and to know that even in such tragedy the motel had given them a place of peace, however briefly.

Bill Clinton had just been elected president, for the second time. It was late on election night and most of the votes were already counted. Carmela and I were not yet citizens, but we watched on the television and ate lots of popcorn, throwing bits to the cats. In Russia, the elections were never cause for celebration. Democracy was a shadowy illusion of the Kremlin. Elections were always landslides. Little did we know that while we amused ourselves, and Bill Clinton was basking in his triumphant second win, the desperate couple was drinking a poisonous cocktail.

I made my usual fifteen-minute warning call to the room, the Caribbean Sunset Room. After several calls with no response, I went in and found the young lovers in each other’s arms, dead. The double suicide made the tabloid papers. Apparently the young fellow had spurned the older sister of his beloved. The rejected sister went mad and had to be institutionalized. The family never forgave him and tried to keep the lovers apart. The papers made him out to be a ruthless cad. I remember seeing them before they went to the room. They seemed simply young and in love. Business slowed down for a while after that, but not for long. This sad story was soon forgotten.

A couple of years after the suicides, there was a death by hanging, but that one never made the papers. President Clinton was in the news again. This time it was about a stain on a stocky girl’s dress. I never understood what the problem was. I can understand his wife being upset, but he’s a man—they are known for losing their minds when it comes to what my mother used to affectionately call their “Monsieur Mindless.”

*  *  *

“Tell your lover, ‘I miss your Monsieur Mindless,’” my mother said to me one night. “It never fails to fluster them, but men like to know you are thinking about them. Miss your,
monsieur
—get it, Stalina?” She was simply being philosophical about men. Her experience was limited to my father and Maxim, but her delusions made her expansive with advice. She knew English and French and would mix the languages in our conversations often. I was very confused, and had been crying about Trofim.

“Yes, Mother, I miss his Monsieur Mindless,” I said.

“Don’t bother with him; he’s a two-faced snob. You can always find someone else to fuck.”

I was too shocked to react, beyond choking back my tears. When I told my friends the expression, they thought my mother was hysterically funny. I informed them that she was losing her mind. My friends still loved the expression, and when we would gossip about the men in or out of our lives, “Monsieur Mindless” was always there. Sometimes I still miss Trofim, but luckily, I live here at the motel and have this red heart-shaped tub to soak away any troubles in the water and bubbles.

*  *  *

That terrible night, a fellow who had been to the motel several times, always with a different woman, rented the “Roller Coaster Fun Park” for two hours. After half an hour he came to the front desk to get change for a fifty-dollar bill. I got a better look at him and saw how strangely he was dressed. His black raincoat had a fur collar, and his head was covered with a baseball cap that had “I Love Berlin” embroidered in red across the front. Previously, I remembered him being bald, but this time he had chin-length black hair sticking out from under the hat. I recognized him for the distinctive pockmarks on his face that had the shape of half moons on both his high cheekbones. He usually signed in as Santa Claus, but that day he signed the name Julius Caesar.

“Hello, how are you today?” I gave him my usual greeting.

“You recognize me?” he shot back.

“It’s your handwriting. Santa Caesar, Julius Claus, it makes no difference—you have a very distinctive half-moon shape to your…letter
C
, sir.”

“Santa Caesar, I like that,” he said.

I heard the door to the Roller Coaster Room open, and then a woman’s voice. “Hey, what are you doing? I thought you’d be right back. I’m feeling lonely all by myself in here.” She had left the door half open.

To my regular customer I said, “Julius Caesar was a very complicated man.”

“Was he now? You are a smart little lady.”

As he turned to go to the room, he looked back at me and said, “What is now amiss that Caesar and his senate should redress?”

It took me a moment, but I added, “Act Three, Scene Four.”

“Act Three, Scene One,” he said as he tipped his baseball hat with the wig attached.

He was in the room for less than an hour, and then he left without the woman. As he passed the front desk, he said, “She’s resting up for the time we have left. Here’s an extra twenty in case she needs more time.”

An hour passed, and I heard nothing from the room, and there was no answer to my phone call. A hardening knot of unease began to grow sharp tentacles in my stomach. I chewed an antacid, which helped, but I still felt that something was terribly wrong.

The crow was making a huge racket outside the room. There is an ugly side to the short-stay world, and this was one I would like to say never happened. As I opened the door, the strong smell of the woman’s perfume hit me, and then I saw her, a scarf pulled tight around her twisted neck. She was hanging dead from the roller-bed-coaster.

I called the police. Two came quickly. Many of them are my customers. They help to keep my business going smoothly and don’t want any trouble for their comrades. The woman, a local prostitute, was one they knew well.

As one of the officers picked his teeth with a matchbook, he said, “We’ll call this a suicide. No worries—we’ll take care of the body. You can go back to work.”

The other officer said, “No need to mention this to anyone, Ms. Folskaya. We’ve got your back.”

“My lips are sealed,” I replied. The poor woman; what brought her to such a sad end I can never know.

Most of my work here at the motel is very routine, but as you can see, at times it can try my patience. And as with the events of that night, they can sometimes do much worse. Booking rooms, taking inquiries from hushed voices in random phone booths, or dealing with the demands of my regular customers who act like this is their own private club. This is my life, my work, my world now.

*  *  *

“What do you mean the Roller Coaster Room is booked?” one of them snapped just the other day.

“Sorry, it’s first come first served; that’s our policy,” I responded.

“But I use the Roller Coaster Room every Thursday at three o’clock. I have now for a year.”

“Why not try the Caribbean Room? It’s very popular.”

He is an older gentleman who always signs himself in as Mark Twain, a local hero here in the Hartford area.

“You’ve got me over a barrel. She’s not going to like it; she likes to eat cotton candy while we…”

“Yes, I understand, but the Caribbean Room has its own romantic charms.”

“Maybe I’ll bring her a piña colada instead of the cotton candy.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said.

*  *  *

Time somehow always moves on. Last week Carmela found half a green rubber sexual pleasure device. I believe it is called a
dildo
. It was cut in half and left on the back seat in the Highway to Heaven Room. She never found the other half. People get crazy. I gave her a twenty-dollar bonus for dealing with that, and we had a good laugh. Another time a pair of fur-covered handcuffs was left in the Gazebo Room locked onto one of the bedposts. We had to dismantle the bed to remove them. Carmela wanted to give them to her boyfriend, but I warned her that without the key they could prove to be dangerous. She hung them on the wall of the linen room, where the cats love to swat at them. Yes, now we have more than one cat. Amalia recently went back to Russia to take care of her mother and left her cats, Shosta and Kovich, at the motel with me.

“They always liked you better,” she said when she brought them by the motel before leaving.

I would miss my old friend. It was hard to hold a grudge after so long, and her referrals from the Majik Cleaning Agency were always very helpful at the motel. We talked about the bras and everything else.

“The past is the past,” I told her. “Both the good and the bad.”

“I am sorry, Stalina, it was a time when I had much confusion. And little money.”

“You are a survivor, Amalia; we both are. I have many reasons to be grateful to you. Go to your mother; she needs you. I can promise you your cats will have a good life here at my motel.”

Shosta and Kovich are that special breed of cat born and bred in Leningrad. Not many cats survived the siege, but the ones that did produced a very hardy strain of felines. These tough cats are a big part of the city’s post-Soviet economy. The babushkas rescue the kittens from back alleys, sewers, and roofs and then sell them on bridges and corners near metro stations. Shosta and Kovich have become fat and lazy here in America, but occasionally they show their “Leningrad” side. They hunt with Svetlana, who learned everything from her surrogate mother, Zarzamora. The only photograph I took of Svetlana and the crow sits along here with the rest of my photo collection. I believe Shosta and Kovich were jealous of ZZ and her relationship with Svetlana. One day the cats chased the crow across the driveway, and she was struck and killed by a car leaving the motel. Svetlana was shaken, as was I. She did not eat for days and just sat under the pine trees where we buried the poor crow.

All in all, this place is not for the faint of heart. Overdoses and fires. Panty hose stretched, ripped, and tied around pillowcases, cigarettes burning on the edge of the toilet. Once a set of false teeth were found in the cup by the bathroom sink. How could someone forget those? It can all make for a very long day. As I recline in the heart-shaped tub, the photographs are my confidants, and with a glass or two of chilled vodka, my words flow freely.
Nostrovya!

Thip!

Today, dear friends, marks my tenth anniversary here at the Liberty Motel in 2001. I am now
Citizen
Stalina, no longer
Comrade
Stalina. Giving up on my country was like severing ties with a lover. Like a haunting, sometimes I still catch a smell or see a shadow from a streetlamp that could only be Russia. Carmela and I call each other “comrade.” It keeps our spirits up.

To my friends and family pictured before me, I say, “I offer you these blunt portraits to shed light on how the last ten years have been. Please pardon me this indulgence, as I drink in honor of this anniversary and my recent citizenship.
Apeeteeta!
”

Thiip!

Mmm, cold, thick vodka, like a fresh pillow against my face.

A toast to Nadia, my ex-boss and autocratic friend, who left five years ago to take her parents back to Petersburg to die. Without her I would not have the Liberty Motel. The other motels she put in the hands of her black suit boys. I am proud to say that our short-stay empire is thriving along Windsor Avenue here in Berlin, Connecticut. The city is still dying, and lucky for us, because as the city continues in a spiral down its sinkhole of recession, our short-stay motels continue to flourish.

To short stays and long sips!
Spaseeba! Nadia!

Thiip!

I made Carmela my business partner. She knows beauty well and has used her love of the land when decorating our special rooms. She was inspired to complete the Caribbean Room, and she was thoughtful enough to incorporate my idea for the “cabana-bed” into the design, which pleased me very much. My most loyal customers, Joanie and Harry, waited with great anticipation for the completion of that room. Ten years after the “roller coaster” incident, they are still conducting their affair “on the side,” as they put it. Neither one wants to give up the other, so they accept their situation with dignity and are pleased to have a place like the Liberty to come to.

A toast to inspired romantic settings and Strauss and Sons Hardware, the local store where we buy everything to decorate the rooms! They always have everything I need, no matter how big or small.

Thiip!

The vodka when chilled correctly is so very smooth.

Carmela molded the blue carpet in the Caribbean Sunset Room into a theater of waves surrounding the cabana-bed, which stands on stilts and has a thatched roof. When the door opens, sounds of the ocean begin to play over and over. She is very, very clever. Harry likes the wraparound sunset mural painted on three walls.

“You see it from all sides when you are lying in the cabana-bed,” Harry says. “It’s all very intoxicating.”

Joanie told me soon after the room was finished, “Harry got me some fancy-schmancy jasmine perfume for our ‘Caribbean’ time. Maybe someday we’ll go to the real Caribbean. Until then, your rooms will have to do, Stalina.”

That was six years ago. They have yet to visit the “real” Caribbean.

“Ginger and coconut are other scents you might want to try. I hear they can be very enticing,” I told her one day when she was returning the key.

After she tried the new scents, she reported back to me. “The coconut made Harry sneeze, and the ginger made him itch where his thumb is missing.”