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Seeds of Change [ << April to July 1998 | January to June 1999 >> | Newest entries ]
New Year's Eve, which for Russians is the real holiday. Christmas was taken away from us for seventy years, so everything moved over to the New Year: the tree, the presents, Grandfather Frost, champagne at midnight, and the whole country watching the same old film on television, The Irony of Fate, every year, always.
The poinsettias are finished. We sold the last ones on the 23rd for half price. My back is finished also.
At four o'clock this afternoon, which is midnight in Moscow, I called Galya. She answered on the first ring, as if she was sitting with her hand on the telephone. Maybe she was.
We did not say sorry exactly. I said, "S Novym godom," Happy New Year. She said it back. Then she told me about the herring under a fur coat she made with one herring for eight people, and I told her about the poinsettias, and she laughed at the story of the night watchman in 1971. Then she said, "Lenochka, the money, you know I..." and I said, "I know." That is all. Twenty minutes, one card, and at the end the recorded woman again, but this time we said goodbye before she did.
Now Misha and I will have our own midnight, eight hours later, with Soviet champagne from the Russian store in Philadelphia, which is terrible, and which we love.
Thanksgiving. Mrs. Weaver invited us downstairs with her son and his family from Harrisburg. I brought a Russian salad, Olivier, with potatoes and pickles and peas and mayonnaise, which the grandchildren looked at as if it came from Mars, and then ate all of it. Mrs. Weaver's son said the grace. He thanked God for "our friends from Russia." I had to look at my plate for a moment.
Misha is seventeen as of last Friday. He is taller than his father now. He will apply for his driver's license in January, God help the state of Pennsylvania.
It is a month since I spoke to Galya. I have sent money two times, with no message, only the number. She took it both times. This is how I know she is still speaking to me, a little.
I wrote her a letter. Four pages. I did not send it. It is in the drawer with the phone card.
Tonight, washing dishes, Misha said, "Just call her, Mam." I said it is complicated. He said, "Everything with you two is complicated. It's still just a phone."
Seventeen. A wise fool. Correct on both parts.
I do not want to write this, so I will write it quickly.
This morning I called Galya. The bank has not opened, and now they say it will not open; the deposits will be "transferred" somewhere, and maybe some part will be returned some day, in rubles. Of the dacha money she will see perhaps a quarter. Maybe nothing. Nastya has left the institute to work in a kiosk selling cigarettes and chocolate bars in the metro.
I said, "Galya, it was my fault. I told you the bank." I wanted her to say it was not. She was quiet, and then she said something. Not the thing I wanted. She said, "Yes, you told me. You also told me you would come for Mama's funeral."
I did not go to Mama's funeral. It was February 1997. I had no money for the ticket, and nobody to leave with Misha, and a new job where I had worked only four months. All of these are true. None of them is enough, I know. I said some things back, about who called Mama every Sunday for three years from a pay phone in the snow. And she said that I left. And I said something about Volodya, her husband, may he rest, which I will not repeat even in Russian.
And then the recorded woman said, in English, "You have one minute remaining." And we both stopped. And we listened to one minute of the long-distance hum, neither of us talking, five thousand miles of it. And then the card was finished.
I bought another card at the gas station. It is here next to the keyboard. I did not call.
Today the poinsettias begin their short days. The plant decides to make the red bracts when the night is long enough, more than about twelve hours of real darkness, so from now until they color nobody is allowed to switch on a light in those houses at night. Mr. Landis tells every year the story of a night watchman in 1971 who turned on the lights for ten minutes to look for his keys, and the whole crop colored late and uneven. Every year the watchman in the story gets a little more stupid.
The ruble is now about sixteen for a dollar. In July it was six. So my dollars, which Galya changes a little at a time, are worth more there than before, and her salary, when it comes, is worth a third. This is the arithmetic of my family now.
I have started an English class, Tuesday evenings at the community college: "Writing for Non-Native Speakers." There are fourteen of us. Vietnamese, Mexican, two Bosnian sisters, a Korean pastor, and a Ukrainian man who pretends not to understand my Russian. The teacher gave back my first essay with a note: "Very clear, but a little formal. Relax!" I wrote RELAX on a card and put it on the refrigerator. Every day Misha adds one more exclamation point. Now there are four.
Last night a baseball player hit his sixty-second home run, which is more than anybody ever, and today in the greenhouse there was no other subject. Even Mr. Landis. Lupe explained the rules to me for the whole lunch. I understand now. It is lapta, the game we played in the village in summer with a stick and a ball, but for millionaires, and with more spitting. Misha says this is exactly correct and I should write it for the newspaper.
It was good to have one day where the news was a man hitting a ball.
Yesterday I sent money for the first time. Three hundred dollars. The office is at the back of a supermarket, next to the lottery. You fill a form, you pay the fee (the fee is shameful, I will not write it), and the girl gives you a number with ten digits. You call Moscow and read the number, and Galya goes to an office with her passport and receives dollars. Magic. Dollars, not rubles, which is the whole point.
Galya did not want to take it. She said, "You have Misha, you have the rent, you have your car which makes the noise." I said, "I have a job which pays in the only currency still standing." Finally she said she would take it "as a loan." Fine. A loan. I will be repaid maybe in 2010, in tomatoes.
The salaries at her school are late again. For August she has received nothing. In Russia the school year starts on the first of September with flowers; every child brings flowers for the teacher. Galya says this year her classroom is full of gladioluses and she has no money for bread. She laughed when she said it. She has always laughed in the wrong places. We both do.
Misha begins his junior year on Tuesday. Last night he said, "I can get a job after school." I said no. He must study. That is the whole reason we are here. He looked at me as if he wanted to argue, and then he did not, and that was worse.
Yeltsin has dismissed the whole government. The ruble goes down every day like water out of a bathtub. In the shops in Moscow, Galya says, the prices are written in pencil now, so they can change them after lunch. Imported things disappear from the shelves: the Finnish butter, the German coffee. People buy buckwheat and sugar in sacks. I know those lines. I was hoping never to know them again, even from almost five thousand miles away.
The bank is still closed.
It was I who told her. On Easter. Better than a jar in the kitchen, like Mama. Mama lived through 1947, and 1991, and 1992, each time the money turning into paper, and she trusted nothing but a jar and a potato cellar. And I, the scientist, the modern woman in America, said: a bank, Galya. With interest.
On Saturday the first Bull's Heart was ripe. I picked it and put it on the kitchen table and looked at it for an hour, like an icon. Then I cut it, with salt. It was Mama's tomato, exactly: the flesh soft and grainy like sugar, sweet and then sour at the back of the tongue. I ate half and could not eat any more.
The other half I used for seed. You squeeze the seeds with their jelly into a jar with a little water and leave them three days to ferment, until there is a mold on top that smells terrible, and then you wash them clean and dry them on a plate. Mama taught me this at the dacha when I was six. The textbook teaches it also. On this, Mama and the textbook agree.
Yesterday the Russian government announced that the ruble will be allowed to fall and that it will not pay its debts. It said this in more complicated words, but I lived there forty-three years and I can translate.
At work nobody talked about it. At work everybody talked about Mr. Clinton, who was on television last night to confess about the intern. Lupe said, "He looked like my son when he broke the window." I said that in my country the government also confessed last night, and also nobody believed it was sorry.
At lunch I drove to the gas station and called Galya from the pay phone with a card. The bank is closed. "Temporarily," she said. "For technical reasons." There is a paper taped on the glass door, above the marble. She stood in a line of two hundred people and read it and went home. She told me this calmly, like a teacher reading attendance. Galya is always calm at the beginning. It is later, alone in the kitchen, that she is not.
I told her it will open. I do not know why I told her this. I know nothing. I water poinsettia cuttings.
The poinsettia cuttings came last week, and we stuck them, twenty-two thousand, in little foam cubes under mist. Now for three weeks we pray to the god of mist nozzles.
The first Bull's Heart is turning. Not red: pink, the pink of a rose who is thinking about something. I check it in the morning before work and in the evening after. Mrs. Weaver says I will wear out the grass.
On the phone Galya says people in Moscow are buying dollars. The exchange booths have lines. She says it is nothing; every summer there is some panic and then it passes, the newspapers need something to write in August. I said, "You are sure the bank is all right?"
She said, "Lena. It has a marble lobby."
[ << April to July 1998 | January to June 1999 >> | Newest entries ]
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