Little Failure (14 page)

Wailing before the customs line, the Jews are saying goodbye to their relatives with all the emotion they are well known for, saying goodbye forever. And there are so many Jews headed out on the Leningrad–East Berlin flight that the shores of Brooklyn and the tree-lined boulevards of Queens and the foggy valleys of San Francisco
are already groaning in anticipation. Eyes still wet, all of us Snotties today, we are searched thoroughly by customs agents. A big man in full uniform takes off my fur hat and pokes around the lining, looking for diamonds we may have stashed illegally within. As a child I have never been mistreated by the system. In Russia, as in socialist China, there is a special grace accorded to children—in both countries there is usually only one little emperor per family. But I am no longer a Soviet citizen, and I am no longer worth according any special childhood privileges. I do not know it, but I am a traitor. And my parents are traitors. And if a good many people got their wish we would be dealt with as traitors.

The customs agent is plunging his thick fingers into my fur hat, and the asthmatic me is so scared he does not even have the wherewithal
not
not to breathe. And so I gulp down the thick ammonia-and-sweat-scented air of the small Stalin-era international terminal of dodgy Pulkovo Airport. My parents are nearby, but for the first time in my life I am alone without them, standing before authority. The customs agent finishes fondling my hat and puts it back on my head with a combination of a smile and a sneer. I am leaving Russia, but he will never leave. If only the child-me could have the compassion to understand that monumental fact.

Down the customs line, our luggage and the two gigantic army-green sacks have been thrown open for inspection. Feathers are flying out of our prized red comforter as the pages of my mother’s beige leather address book—the names and phone numbers of some relatives in Queens—are being torn out for no good reason by a sadist in uniform, as if we are spies smuggling information to the West. Which, in a sense, we are.

And then we are clear of the formalities, and clear also of our relatives. Writing today I can guess the word in my mother’s mind:
tragediya
. It is a tragic day for her. My father’s mother will soon join us in America, but my mother will not see her mother until 1987, right before her death, by which point Grandma Galya will be too far gone to even recognize her second daughter. Until the reformist Gorbachev
takes over, traitors to the Soviet Union are not allowed to return to visit their dying parents. I suppose I am feeling her sadness, because I am, as my mother likes to say,
chutkiy
, or sensitive. But truth be told, I am not
chutkiy
enough. Because all I can see in front of us is the Aeroflot plane, the Tupolev-154. On one of his didactic trips around the Chesme Church, my father has told me that the Tupolev is the fastest civilian jet ever built, faster than the American Boeing 727! Certainly faster than the toy helicopter we are launching at the church spires along with our aeronautical cheers of “URA!”

And now we are inside this sleek, magical airplane, the one that can so decisively outfly our Cold War rival’s, and rumbling past the vast airfield, past the denuded winter trees in the distance, past the acres of snow deep enough to hide a thousand children. Forget asthma. I, myself, am holding my breath before the wonder of it. Sure, I am afraid of heights, but being inside the futuristic Tupolev, the fastest civilian jet ever built, is akin to being wrapped in my father’s arms.

No one has told me where we are going, but I have already prepared to be a fine representative of the Soviet race. On my breast, beneath the monumental overcoat and the monumental winter sweater, is a shirt sold only in the USSR and perhaps in the more discriminating shops of Pyongyang. It is a green wide-collared thing with blue and green vertical stripes and, between the stripes, a galaxy of yellow polka dots. The terminals of the shirt are tucked into a pair of black pants that reach up to my kidneys, ostensibly to keep them warm in transit. I have pinned this shirt with the symbol of the upcoming 1980 Moscow Olympics, a stylized Kremlin capped with a red star. The fluid lines of the Kremlin are reaching toward the star because my nation is always reaching toward excellence. Beneath the Olympic pin is situated the pin of a smiling tiger’s face. This is in mourning of
Tigr
, my stuffed tiger, who is too big to make the journey to wherever it is we are going.

Which is
where
again? Mama and Papa remain silent and worried throughout the flight. My mother scans the airplane’s badly sealed
window for drafts. Drafts, according to Russian medical lore, are the great, silent killers.

We land with a proper thud somewhere and taxi to a terminal. I am looking out the window and
yobtiki mat’
, fuck your mother, the sign—
FLUGHAFEN BERLIN-SCHÖNEFELD
—is not even in Russian anymore. Inside the terminal, past the officials in their green getups, an unfortunate, umlauted language is being spoken, my first understanding that the world is not powered entirely by the great and mighty Russian tongue.

“Papa, who are these people?”

“Germans.”

But aren’t we supposed to kill Germans? That’s what Grandpa did to them in the Great Patriotic War before they blew him up in his tank. (A childhood lie on someone’s part; as I’ve mentioned before, he was merely an artilleryman.) And yet, even the child in me senses the difference between here and home. East Berlin is the socialist showpiece of the entire Warsaw Pact, and the airport waiting lounge seems to hover somewhere between Russia and the West. There are dashes of chrome, if I remember correctly, and exotic nongray colors, purple or mauve perhaps. The men seem to be powered by some extraordinary force, a grim ability to walk forth in a straight line and to meaningfully declare things in their strange tongue. The difference, I am too young to understand, is that the men here are not completely, debilitatingly drunk.

Fuck your mother, please, where are we going?

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition, and this is the problem with sending an already disturbed child across not just national borders but, in the year 1978, across interplanetary ones. I have not had a full-blown asthma attack in twenty of the past nearly forty years, but even thinking of Flughafen Berlin-Schönefeld shortens my breath as I write this. Here we are sitting surrounded by our possessions, two army-green sacks and a trio of orange suitcases made out of
real Polish leather
that
leave my hands smelling like cow. Here I am next to Mama, who has just surrendered her dying mother. Here I am next to our family’s history, which I do not fully know yet, but which is every bit as heavy as our two army-green sacks. Here I am pushing my own history through East German customs, a history not even seven years old but already with its own mass and velocity. In practical terms, the army-green sacks are too heavy for a child, or a mama, to lift, but I push them forward with a kick whenever I can to help out my family. The instincts that will see me through my life are stirring for the first time: forward, move forward, keep going, keep kicking.

And then another Soviet plane, the water-bug-shaped, propeller-driven Ilyushin-18, bellies up to the terminal, and I am excited by the thought of a second plane ride in one day, even if instead of the Soviet carrier Aeroflot, its logo a hammer and sickle bracketed by a pair of enormous goose-like wings, we are seated within an East German airliner with the ugly name of Interflug and no Communist coat of arms to speak of. I am strapped in; the plane takes off for a very short (and loud and droning) flight south. Momentarily, we will land in a world unlike any we could have imagined, the one many will tell us is free.

But nothing is free.

Vienna. To this day passing through its fancy international airport is bittersweet. This is the first stop on what is becoming a regular three-part journey for Soviet Jews. First, Vienna, then Rome, then an English-Speaking Country Elsewhere. Or, for the true believers, Israel.

In addition to my Moscow Olympics pin and my homage to my
tigr
, a worn Soviet atlas accompanies me to Vienna. I love maps. With their longitudes crossing latitudes at precise ninety-degree angles, with the topographical yellows of the African veldt and the pale caviar grays of the Caspian Sea, maps will help make sense of the world spinning relentlessly beneath our feet.

The customs area at VIE is a madhouse of Russian immigrants collecting their worldly possessions. One of our swollen army-green sacks happens to burst in transit, spilling out one hundred kilograms of red compasses with yellow hammers and sickles that, unbeknownst to me, we are going to sell to Communist Italians. As Mama and Papa crawl on all fours trying to gather their wares,
yobtiki mat’, yobtiki mat’
, I subdue my sweaty worry by carefully tracing the frosty expanses of Greenland in my atlas
—cold, cold, cold—
rocking back and forth like a religious Jew. The first Western person I have ever seen, a middle-aged Austrian woman in a dappled fur coat, sees me
davening
over my maps. She elegantly steps over my parents and hands me a Mozart chocolate candy. She smiles at me with eyes the color of Lake Neusiedl, one of the largest in Austria according to my map of Central Europe. If I believe in anything now, it is in the providence of that woman.

But here is another thing that I see: My parents are on their knees. We are in a foreign country, and my parents are on the floor trying to gather the flimsy goods that are to sustain us through our journey.

On that night, we are “safe” in the West. We are staying in a Viennese rooming house called Pan Bettini, which is also being used by the local prostitutes. “Such classy prostitutes!” my mother exclaims. “They ride on bikes. They dress so subtly.”

“I know I’m not allowed chocolate,” I say, “but can I eat the Mozart candy? I’ll save the wrapper for later. It will be my toy.”

“Listen, little son,” my father says. “I can tell you a secret. We are going to America.”

I cannot breathe. He hugs me.

Or maybe it should be: He hugs me. I cannot breathe.

Either way, we are going to the enemy.

Christmas is coming to Vienna, and few cities take the holiday as seriously. Papa and I are walking down the broad Hapsburg boulevards lost to neon and red trim and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s thin-lipped
visage and the occasional manger with its silent wooden Baby Jesus. In my thickly gloved hand I am holding my own Lord and Savior, an inhaler. My lungs are still swollen, the phlegm is rumbling inside, but the illness has been dealt a serious setback by that miracle of Western technology, courtesy of an ancient Viennese doctor whom my father has charmed with his broken German (“asthma
über alles
!”).

We are going to the enemy.

In my father’s hand a different kind of miracle, a banana. Who has ever heard of a banana in winter? But here in the Austrian capital, for less than a schilling, it is possible. The shopwindows are crammed with goods—vacuum cleaners with nozzles thin and powerful like the snouts of aardvarks; cutouts of tall, elegant women holding aloft jars of cream, their faces smiling like they mean it; models of healthy boys dressed haphazardly in ensembles of woolen caps, shockingly short winter jackets (but won’t these Austrian
Jungen
catch cold?), and gleaming corduroy pants. My father and I are walking mouths open, so that “a crow may fly in,” as the Russian saying goes. We have seen the Opera and the Wien Museum, but what has impressed us the most is the frighteningly fast black-and-yellow trams that zip us across town and to the Danube in minutes.

We are going to the enemy.

Here the first moral quandary sets in. The Viennese trams operate on the honor system. Do we use the few schillings we have to buy a ticket, or do we take advantage of the West’s generosity and buy more bananas? A source of much discussion, but in the end Papa decides that we better not upset the Austrians. Or you-know-what might happen again. All around us late-model Mercedeses sweep the gaily illuminated streets, lit to within an inch of daylight. There are thousands of us Soviet Jews stomping our way through Christmas Vienna that night, mouths agape, letting the pleasure and the horror of home-leaving finally wash over all of us, wondering if we really should have paid for that tram ticket. In our hotels, we have all been confronted with
the shelf in the bathroom
, containing not just one but two spare
rolls of toilet paper. Before such magnificence our collective Soviet ethics yield. We grab the spare toilet paper and stuff it into the most sacred parts of our luggage, edging out all those degrees in mechanical engineering.